England in the autumn?–that struck him as a very happy thought. It would give him such pleasure to do what he could for them–to have them come and spend a month with him. Osmond, by his own admission, had been to England but once; which was an absurd state of things for a man of his leisure and intelligence. It was just the country for him–he would be sure to get on well there. Then Lord Warburton asked Isabel if she remembered what a good time she had had there and if she didn’t want to try it again. Didn’t she want to see Gardencourt once more? Gardencourt was really very good. Touchett didn’t take proper care of it, but it was the sort of place you could hardly spoil by letting it alone. Why didn’t they come and pay Touchett a visit? He surely must have asked them. Hadn’t asked them? What an ill-mannered wretch! –and Lord Warburton promised to give the master of Gardencourt a piece of his mind. Of course it was a mere accident; he would be delighted to have them. Spending a month with Touchett and a month with himself, and seeing all the rest of the people they must know there, they really wouldn’t find it half bad. Lord Warburton added that it would amuse Miss Osmond as well, who had told him that she had never been to England and whom he had assured it was a country she deserved to see. Of course she didn’t need to go to England to be admired–that was her fate everywhere; but she would be an immense success there, she certainly would, if that was any inducement. He asked if she were not at home: couldn’t he say good-bye? Not that he liked good-byes–he always funked them. When he left England the other day he hadn’t said good-bye to a two-legged creature. He had had half a mind to leave Rome without troubling Mrs. Osmond for a final interview. What could be more dreary than final interviews? One never said the things one wanted–one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn’t, simply from a sense that one had to say something. Such a sense was upsetting; it muddled one’s wits. He had it at present, and that was the effect it produced on him. If Mrs. Osmond didn’t think he spoke as he ought she must set it down to agitation; it was no light thing to part with Mrs. Osmond. He was really very sorry to be going. He had thought of writing to her instead of calling–but he would write to her at any rate, to tell her a lot of things that would be sure to occur to him as soon as he had left the house. They must think seriously about coming to Lockleigh.
If there was anything awkward in the conditions of his visit or in the announcement of his departure it failed to come to the surface. Lord Warburton talked about his agitation; but he showed it in no other manner, and Isabel saw that since he had determined on a retreat he was capable of executing it gallantly. She was very glad for him; she liked him quite well enough to wish him to appear to carry a thing off. He would do that on any occasion–not from impudence but simply from the habit of success; and Isabel felt it out of her husband’s power to frustrate this faculty. A complex operation, as she sat there, went on in her mind. On one side she listened to their visitor; said what was proper to him; read, more or less, between the lines of what he said himself; and wondered how he would have spoken if he had found her alone. On the other she had a perfect consciousness of Osmond’s emotion. She felt almost sorry for him; he was condemned to the sharp pain of loss without the relief of cursing. He had had a great hope, and now, as he saw it vanish into smoke, he was obliged to sit and smile and twirl his thumbs. Not that he troubled himself to smile very brightly; he treated their friend on the whole to as vacant a countenance as so clever a man could very well wear. It was indeed a part of Osmond’s cleverness that he could look consummately uncompromised. His present appearance, however, was not a confession of disappointment; it was simply a part of Osmond’s habitual system, which was to be inexpressive exactly in proportion as he was really intent. He had been intent on this prize from the first; but he had never allowed his eagerness to irradiate his refined face. He had treated his possible son-in-law as he treated every one–with an air of being interested in him only for his own advantage, not for any profit to a person already so generally, so perfectly provided as Gilbert Osmond. He would give no sign now of an inward rage which was the result of a vanished prospect of gain–not the faintest nor subtlest. Isabel could be sure of that, if it was any satisfaction to her. Strangely, very strangely, it was a satisfaction; she wished Lord Warburton to triumph before her husband, and at the same time she wished her husband to be very superior before Lord Warburton. Osmond, in his way, was admirable; he had, like their visitor, the advantage of an acquired habit. It was not that of succeeding, but it was something almost as good–that of not attempting. As he leaned back in his place, listening but vaguely to the other’s friendly offers and suppressed explanations–as if it were only proper to assume that they were addressed essentially to his wife–he had at least (since so little else was left him) the comfort of thinking how well he personally had kept out of it, and how the air of indifference, which he was now able to wear, had the added beauty of consistency. It was something to be able to look as if the leave-taker’s movements had no relation to his own mind. The latter did well, certainly; but Osmond’s performance was in its very nature more finished. Lord Warburton’s position was after all an easy one; there was no reason in the world why he shouldn’t leave Rome. He had had beneficent inclinations, but they had stopped short of fruition; he had never committed himself, and his honour was safe. Osmond appeared to take but a moderate interest in the proposal that they should go and stay with him and in his allusion to the success Pansy might extract from their visit. He murmured a recognition, but left Isabel to say that it was a matter requiring grave consideration. Isabel, even while she made this remark, could see the great vista which had suddenly opened out in her husband’s mind, with Pansy’s little figure marching up the middle of it.
Lord Warburton had asked leave to bid good-bye to Pansy, but neither Isabel nor Osmond had made any motion to send for her. He had the air of giving out that his visit must be short; he sat on a small chair, as if it were only for a moment, keeping his hat in his hand. But he stayed and stayed; Isabel wondered what he was waiting for. She believed it was not to see Pansy; she had an impression that on the whole he would rather not see Pansy. It was of course to see herself alone–he had something to say to her. Isabel had no great wish to hear it, for she was afraid it would be an explanation, and she could perfectly dispense with explanations. Osmond, however, presently got up, like a man of good taste to whom it had occurred that so inveterate a visitor might wish to say just the last word of all to the ladies. “I’ve a letter to write before dinner,” he said; “you must excuse me. I’ll see if my daughter’s disengaged, and if she is she shall know you’re here. Of course when you come to Rome you’ll always look us up. Mrs. Osmond will talk to you about the English expedition: she decides all those things.”
The nod with which, instead of a hand-shake, he wound up this little speech was perhaps rather a meagre form of salutation; but on the whole it was all the occasion demanded. Isabel reflected that after he left the room Lord Warburton would have no pretext for saying, “Your husband’s very angry”; which would have been extremely disagreeable to her. Nevertheless, if he had done so, she would have said: “Oh, don’t be anxious. He doesn’t hate you: it’s me that he hates!”
It was only when they had been left alone together that her friend showed a certain vague awkwardness–sitting down in another chair, handling two or three of the objects that were near him. “I hope he’ll make Miss Osmond come,” he presently remarked. “I want very much to see her.”
“I’m glad it’s the last time,” said Isabel.
“So am I. She doesn’t care for me.”
“No, she doesn’t care for you.”
“I don’t wonder at it,” he returned. Then he added with inconsequence: “You’ll come to England, won’t you?”
“I think we had better not.”
“Ah, you owe me a visit. Don’t you remember that you were to have come to Lockleigh once, and you never did?”
“Everything’s changed since then,” said Isabel.
“Not changed for the worse, surely–as far as we’re concerned. To see you under my roof”–and he hung fire but an instant–“would be a great satisfaction.”
She had feared an explanation; but that was the only one that occurred. They talked a little of Ralph, and in another moment Pansy came in, already dressed for dinner and with a little red spot in either cheek. She shook hands with Lord Warburton and stood looking up into his face with a fixed smile–a smile that Isabel knew, though his lordship probably never suspected it, to be near akin to a burst of tears.
“I’m going away,” he said. “I want to bid you good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Lord Warburton.” Her voice perceptibly trembled.
“And I want to tell you how much I wish you may be very happy.”
“Thank you, Lord Warburton,” Pansy answered.
He lingered a moment and gave a glance at Isabel. “You ought to be very happy–you’ve got a guardian angel.”
“I’m sure I shall be happy,” said Pansy in the tone of a person whose certainties were always cheerful.
“Such a conviction as that will take you a great way. But if it should ever fail you, remember–remember–” And her interlocutor stammered a little. “Think of me sometimes, you know!” he said with a vague laugh. Then he shook hands with Isabel in silence, and presently he was gone.
When he had left the room she expected an effusion of tears from her stepdaughter; but Pansy in fact treated her to something very different.
“I think you ARE my guardian angel!” she exclaimed very sweetly.
Isabel shook her head. “I’m not an angel of any kind. I’m at the most your good friend.”
“You’re a very good friend then–to have asked papa to be gentle with me.”
“I’ve asked your father nothing,” said Isabel, wondering.
“He told me just now to come to the drawing-room, and then he gave me a very kind kiss.”
“Ah,” said Isabel, “that was quite his own idea!”
She recognised the idea perfectly; it was very characteristic, and she was to see a great deal more of it. Even with Pansy he couldn’t put himself the least in the wrong. They were dining out that day, and after their dinner they went to another entertainment; so that it was not till late in the evening that Isabel saw him alone. When Pansy kissed him before going to bed he returned her embrace with even more than his usual munificence, and Isabel wondered if he meant it as a hint that his daughter had been injured by the machinations of her stepmother. It was a partial expression, at any rate, of what he continued to expect of his wife. She was about to follow Pansy, but he remarked that he wished she would remain; he had something to say to her. Then he walked about the drawing-room a little, while she stood waiting in her cloak.
“I don’t understand what you wish to do,” he said in a moment. “I should like to know–so that I may know how to act.”
“Just now I wish to go to bed. I’m very tired.”
“Sit down and rest; I shall not keep you long. Not there–take a comfortable place.” And he arranged a multitude of cushions that were scattered in picturesque disorder upon a vast divan. This was not, however, where she seated herself; she dropped into the nearest chair. The fire had gone out; the lights in the great room were few. She drew her cloak about her; she felt mortally cold. “I think you’re trying to humiliate me,” Osmond went on. “It’s a most absurd undertaking.”
“I haven’t the least idea what you mean,” she returned.
“You’ve played a very deep game; you’ve managed it beautifully.”
“What is it that I’ve managed?”
“You’ve not quite settled it, however; we shall see him again.” And he stopped in front of her, with his hands in his pockets, looking down at her thoughtfully, in his usual way, which seemed meant to let her know that she was not an object, but only a rather disagreeable incident, of thought.
“If you mean that Lord Warburton’s under an obligation to come back you’re wrong,” Isabel said. “He’s under none whatever.”
“That’s just what I complain of. But when I say he’ll come back I don’t mean he’ll come from a sense of duty.”
“There’s nothing else to make him. I think he has quite exhausted Rome.”
“Ah no, that’s a shallow judgement. Rome’s inexhaustible.” And Osmond began to walk about again. “However, about that perhaps there’s no hurry,” he added. “It’s rather a good idea of his that we should go to England. If it were not for the fear of finding your cousin there I think I should try to persuade you.”
“It may be that you’ll not find my cousin,” said Isabel.
“I should like to be sure of it. However, I shall be as sure as possible. At the same time I should like to see his house, that you told me so much about at one time: what do you call it?– Gardencourt. It must be a charming thing. And then, you know, I’ve a devotion to the memory of your uncle: you made me take a great fancy to him. I should like to see where he lived and died. That indeed is a detail. Your friend was right. Pansy ought to see England.”
“I’ve no doubt she would enjoy it,” said Isabel.
“But that’s a long time hence; next autumn’s far off,” Osmond continued; “and meantime there are things that more nearly interest us. Do you think me so very proud?” he suddenly asked.
“I think you very strange.”
“You don’t understand me.”
“No, not even when you insult me.”
“I don’t insult you; I’m incapable of it. I merely speak of certain facts, and if the allusion’s an injury to you the fault’s not mine. It’s surely a fact that you have kept all this matter quite in your own hands.”
“Are you going back to Lord Warburton?” Isabel asked. “I’m very tired of his name.”
“You shall hear it again before we’ve done with it.”
She had spoken of his insulting her, but it suddenly seemed to her that this ceased to be a pain. He was going down–down; the vision of such a fall made her almost giddy: that was the only pain. He was too strange, too different; he didn’t touch her. Still, the working of his morbid passion was extraordinary, and she felt a rising curiosity to know in what light he saw himself justified. “I might say to you that I judge you’ve nothing to say to me that’s worth hearing,” she returned in a moment. “But I should perhaps be wrong. There’s a thing that would be worth my hearing–to know in the plainest words of what it is you accuse me.”
“Of having prevented Pansy’s marriage to Warburton. Are those words plain enough?”
“On the contrary, I took a great interest in it. I told you so; and when you told me that you counted on me–that I think was what you said–I accepted the obligation. I was a fool to do so, but I did it.”
“You pretended to do it, and you even pretended reluctance to make me more willing to trust you. Then you began to use your ingenuity to get him out of the way.”
“I think I see what you mean,” said Isabel.
“Where’s the letter you told me he had written me?” her husband demanded.
“I haven’t the least idea; I haven’t asked him.”
“You stopped it on the way,” said Osmond.
Isabel slowly got up; standing there in her white cloak, which covered her to her feet, she might have represented the angel of disdain, first cousin to that of pity. “Oh, Gilbert, for a man who was so fine–!” she exclaimed in a long murmur.
“I was never so fine as you. You’ve done everything you wanted. You’ve got him out of the say without appearing to do so, and you’ve placed me in the position in which you wished to see me– that of a man who has tried to marry his daughter to a lord, but has grotesquely failed.”
“Pansy doesn’t care for him. She’s very glad he’s gone,” Isabel said.
“That has nothing to do with the matter.”
“And he doesn’t care for Pansy.”
“That won’t do; you told me he did. I don’t know why you wanted this particular satisfaction,” Osmond continued; “you might have taken some other. It doesn’t seem to me that I’ve been presumptuous–that I have taken too much for granted. I’ve been very modest about it, very quiet. The idea didn’t originate with me. He began to show that he liked her before I ever thought of it. I left it all to you.”
“Yes, you were very glad to leave it to me. After this you must attend to such things yourself.”
He looked at her a moment; then he turned away. “I thought you were very fond of my daughter.”
“I’ve never been more so than to-day.”
“Your affection is attended with immense limitations. However, that perhaps is natural.”
“Is this all you wished to say to me?” Isabel asked, taking a candle that stood on one of the tables.
“Are you satisfied? Am I sufficiently disappointed?”
“I don’t think that on the whole you’re disappointed. You’ve had another opportunity to try to stupefy me.”
“It’s not that. It’s proved that Pansy can aim high.”
“Poor little Pansy!” said Isabel as she turned away with her candle.
CHAPTER XLVII
It was from Henrietta Stackpole that she learned how Caspar Goodwood had come to Rome; an event that took place three days after Lord Warburton’s departure. This latter fact had been preceded by an incident of some importance to Isabel–the temporary absence, once again, of Madame Merle, who had gone to Naples to stay with a friend, the happy possessor of a villa at Posilippo. Madame Merle had ceased to minister to Isabel’s happiness, who found herself wondering whether the most discreet of women might not also by chance be the most dangerous. Sometimes, at night, she had strange visions; she seemed to see her husband and her friend–his friend–in dim, indistinguishable combination. It seemed to her that she had not done with her; this lady had something in reserve. Isabel’s imagination applied itself actively to this elusive point, but every now and then it was checked by a nameless dread, so that when the charming woman was away from Rome she had almost a consciousness of respite. She had already learned from Miss Stackpole that Caspar Goodwood was in Europe, Henrietta having written to make it known to her immediately after meeting him in Paris. He himself never wrote to Isabel, and though he was in Europe she thought it very possible he might not desire to see her. Their last interview, before her marriage, had had quite the character of a complete rupture; if she remembered rightly he had said he wished to take his last look at her. Since then he had been the most discordant survival of her earlier time–the only one in fact with which a permanent pain was associated. He had left her that morning with a sense of the most superfluous of shocks: it was like a collision between vessels in broad daylight. There had been no mist, no hidden current to excuse it, and she herself had only wished to steer wide. He had bumped against her prow, however, while her hand was on the tiller, and–to complete the metaphor–had given the lighter vessel a strain which still occasionally betrayed itself in a faint creaking. It had been horrid to see him, because he represented the only serious harm that (to her belief) she had ever done in the world: he was the only person with an unsatisfied claim on her. She had made him unhappy, she couldn’t help it; and his unhappiness was a grim reality. She had cried with rage, after he had left her, at–she hardly knew what: she tried to think it had been at his want of consideration. He had come to her with his unhappiness when her own bliss was so perfect; he had done his best to darken the brightness of those pure rays. He had not been violent, and yet there had been a violence in the impression. There had been a violence at any rate in something somewhere; perhaps it was only in her own fit of weeping and in that after-sense of the same which had lasted three or four days.
The effect of his final appeal had in short faded away, and all the first year of her marriage he had dropped out of her books. He was a thankless subject of reference; it was disagreeable to have to think of a person who was sore and sombre about you and whom you could yet do nothing to relieve. It would have been different if she had been able to doubt, even a little, of his unreconciled state, as she doubted of Lord Warburton’s; unfortunately it was beyond question, and this aggressive, uncompromising look of it was just what made it unattractive. She could never say to herself that here was a sufferer who had compensations, as she was able to say in the case of her English suitor. She had no faith in Mr. Goodwood’s compensations and no esteem for them. A cotton factory was not a compensation for anything–least of all for having failed to marry Isabel Archer. And yet, beyond that, she hardly knew what he had–save of course his intrinsic qualities. Oh, he was intrinsic enough; she never thought of his even looking for artificial aids. If he extended his business–that, to the best of her belief, was the only form exertion could take with him–it would be because it was an enterprising thing, or good for the business; not in the least because he might hope it would overlay the past. This gave his figure a kind of bareness and bleakness which made the accident of meeting it in memory or in apprehension a peculiar concussion; it was deficient in the social drapery commonly muffling, in an overcivilized age, the sharpness of human contacts. His perfect silence, moreover, the fact that she never heard from him and very seldom heard any mention of him, deepened this impression of his loneliness. She asked Lily for news of him, from time to time; but Lily knew nothing of Boston–her imagination was all bounded on the east by Madison Avenue. As time went on Isabel had thought of him oftener, and with fewer restrictions; she had had more than once the idea of writing to him. She had never told her husband about him–never let Osmond know of his visits to her in Florence; a reserve not dictated in the early period by a want of confidence in Osmond, but simply by the consideration that the young man’s disappointment was not her secret but his own. It would be wrong of her, she had believed, to convey it to another, and Mr. Goodwood’s affairs could have, after all, little interest for Gilbert. When it had come to the point she had never written to him; it seemed to her that, considering his grievance, the least she could do was to let him alone. Nevertheless she would have been glad to be in some way nearer to him. It was not that it ever occurred to her that she might have married him; even after the consequences of her actual union had grown vivid to her that particular reflection, though she indulged in so many, had not had the assurance to present itself. But on finding herself in trouble he had become a member of that circle of things with which she wished to set herself right. I have mentioned how passionately she needed to feel that her unhappiness should not have come to her through her own fault. She had no near prospect of dying, and yet she wished to make her peace with the world– to put her spiritual affairs in order. It came back to her from time to time that there was an account still to be settled with Caspar, and she saw herself disposed or able to settle it to-day on terms easier for him than ever before. Still, when she learned he was coming to Rome she felt all afraid; it would be more disagreeable for him than for any one else to make out–since he WOULD make it out, as over a falsified balance-sheet or something of that sort–the intimate disarray of her affairs. Deep in her breast she believed that he had invested his all in her happiness, while the others had invested only a part. He was one more person from whom she should have to conceal her stress. She was reassured, however, after he arrived in Rome, for he spent several days without coming to see her.
Henrietta Stackpole, it may well be imagined, was more punctual, and Isabel was largely favoured with the society of her friend. She threw herself into it, for now that she had made such a point of keeping her conscience clear, that was one way of proving she had not been superficial–the more so as the years, in their flight, had rather enriched than blighted those peculiarities which had been humorously criticised by persons less interested than Isabel, and which were still marked enough to give loyalty a spice of heroism. Henrietta was as keen and quick and fresh as ever, and as neat and bright and fair. Her remarkably open eyes, lighted like great glazed railway-stations, had put up no shutters; her attire had lost none of its crispness, her opinions none of their national reference. She was by no means quite unchanged, however it struck Isabel she had grown vague. Of old she had never been vague; though undertaking many enquiries at once, she had managed to be entire and pointed about each. She had a reason for everything she did; she fairly bristled with motives. Formerly, when she came to Europe it was because she wished to see it, but now, having already seen it, she had no such excuse. She didn’t for a moment pretend that the desire to examine decaying civilisations had anything to do with her present enterprise; her journey was rather an expression of her independence of the old world than of a sense of further obligations to it. “It’s nothing to come to Europe,” she said to Isabel; “it doesn’t seem to me one needs so many reasons for that. It is something to stay at home; this is much more important.” It was not therefore with a sense of doing anything very important that she treated herself to another pilgrimage to Rome; she had seen the place before and carefully inspected it; her present act was simply a sign of familiarity, of her knowing all about it, of her having as good a right as any one else to be there. This was all very well, and Henrietta was restless; she had a perfect right to be restless too, if one came to that. But she had after all a better reason for coming to Rome than that she cared for it so little. Her friend easily recognised it, and with it the worth of the other’s fidelity. She had crossed the stormy ocean in midwinter because she had guessed that Isabel was sad. Henrietta guessed a great deal, but she had never guessed so happily as that. Isabel’s satisfactions just now were few, but even if they had been more numerous there would still have been something of individual joy in her sense of being justified in having always thought highly of Henrietta. She had made large concessions with regard to her, and had yet insisted that, with all abatements, she was very valuable. It was not her own triumph, however, that she found good; it was simply the relief of confessing to this confidant, the first person to whom she had owned it, that she was not in the least at her ease. Henrietta had herself approached this point with the smallest possible delay, and had accused her to her face of being wretched. She was a woman, she was a sister; she was not Ralph, nor Lord Warburton, nor Caspar Goodwood, and Isabel could speak.
“Yes, I’m wretched,” she said very mildly. She hated to hear herself say it; she tried to say it as judicially as possible.
“What does he do to you?” Henrietta asked, frowning as if she were enquiring into the operations of a quack doctor.
“He does nothing. But he doesn’t like me.”
“He’s very hard to please!” cried Miss Stackpole. “Why don’t you leave him?”
“I can’t change that way,” Isabel said.
“Why not, I should like to know? You won’t confess that you’ve made a mistake. You’re too proud.”
“I don’t know whether I’m too proud. But I can’t publish my mistake. I don’t think that’s decent. I’d much rather die.”
“You won’t think so always,” said Henrietta.
“I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one’s deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can’t change that way,” Isabel repeated.
“You HAVE changed, in spite of the impossibility. I hope you don’t mean to say you like him.”
Isabel debated. “No, I don’t like him. I can tell you, because I’m weary of my secret. But that’s enough; I can’t announce it on the housetops.”
Henrietta gave a laugh. “Don’t you think you’re rather too considerate?”
“It’s not of him that I’m considerate–it’s of myself!” Isabel answered.
It was not surprising Gilbert Osmond should not have taken comfort in Miss Stackpole; his instinct had naturally set him in opposition to a young lady capable of advising his wife to withdraw from the conjugal roof. When she arrived in Rome he had said to Isabel that he hoped she would leave her friend the interviewer alone; and Isabel had answered that he at least had nothing to fear from her. She said to Henrietta that as Osmond didn’t like her she couldn’t invite her to dine, but they could easily see each other in other ways. Isabel received Miss Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a respectful attention which Henrietta occasionally found irritating. She complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little look as if she should remember everything one said. “I don’t want to be remembered that way,” Miss Stackpole declared; “I consider that my conversation refers only to the moment, like the morning papers. Your stepdaughter, as she sits there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring them out some day against me.” She could not teach herself to think favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of conversation, of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of twenty, unnatural and even uncanny. Isabel presently saw that Osmond would have liked her to urge a little the cause of her friend, insist a little upon his receiving her, so that he might appear to suffer for good manners’ sake. Her immediate acceptance of his objections put him too much in the wrong–it being in effect one of the disadvantages of expressing contempt that you cannot enjoy at the same time the credit of expressing sympathy. Osmond held to his credit, and yet he held to his objections– all of which were elements difficult to reconcile. The right thing would have been that Miss Stackpole should come to dine at Palazzo Roccanera once or twice, so that (in spite of his superficial civility, always so great) she might judge for herself how little pleasure it gave him. From the moment, however, that both the ladies were so unaccommodating, there was nothing for Osmond but to wish the lady from New York would take herself off. It was surprising how little satisfaction he got from his wife’s friends; he took occasion to call Isabel’s attention to it.
“You’re certainly not fortunate in your intimates; I wish you might make a new collection,” he said to her one morning in reference to nothing visible at the moment, but in a tone of ripe reflection which deprived the remark of all brutal abruptness. “It’s as if you had taken the trouble to pick out the people in the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have always thought a conceited ass–besides his being the most ill-favoured animal I know. Then it’s insufferably tiresome that one can’t tell him so; one must spare him on account of his health. His health seems to me the best part of him; it gives him privileges enjoyed by no one else. If he’s so desperately ill there’s only one way to prove it; but he seems to have no mind for that. I can’t say much more for the great Warburton. When one really thinks of it, the cool insolence of that performance was something rare! He comes and looks at one’s daughter as if she were a suite of apartments; he tries the door-handles and looks out of the windows, raps on the walls and almost thinks he’ll take the place. Will you be so good as to draw up a lease? Then, on the whole, he decides that the rooms are too small; he doesn’t think he could live on a third floor; he must look out for a piano nobile. And he goes away after having got a month’s lodging in the poor little apartment for nothing. Miss Stackpole, however, is your most wonderful invention. She strikes me as a kind of monster. One hasn’t a nerve in one’s body that she doesn’t set quivering. You know I never have admitted that she’s a woman. Do you know what she reminds me of? Of a new steel pen– the most odious thing in nature. She talks as a steel pen writes; aren’t her letters, by the way, on ruled paper? She thinks and moves and walks and looks exactly as she talks. You may say that she doesn’t hurt me, inasmuch as I don’t see her. I don’t see her, but I hear her; I hear her all day long. Her voice is in my ears; I can’t get rid of it. I know exactly what she says, and every inflexion of the tone in which she says it. She says charming things about me, and they give you great comfort. I don’t like at all to think she talks about me–I feel as I should feel if I knew the footman were wearing my hat.”
Henrietta talked about Gilbert Osmond, as his wife assured him, rather less than he suspected. She had plenty of other subjects, in two of which the reader may be supposed to be especially interested. She let her friend know that Caspar Goodwood had discovered for himself that she was unhappy, though indeed her ingenuity was unable to suggest what comfort he hoped to give her by coming to Rome and yet not calling on her. They met him twice in the street, but he had no appearance of seeing them; they were driving, and he had a habit of looking straight in front of him, as if he proposed to take in but one object at a time. Isabel could have fancied she had seen him the day before; it must have been with just that face and step that he had walked out of Mrs. Touchett’s door at the close of their last interview. He was dressed just as he had been dressed on that day, Isabel remembered the colour of his cravat; and yet in spite of this familiar look there was a strangeness in his figure too, something that made her feel it afresh to be rather terrible he should have come to Rome. He looked bigger and more overtopping than of old, and in those days he certainly reached high enough. She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him; but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a February sky.
Miss Stackpole’s other topic was very different; she gave Isabel the latest news about Mr. Bantling. He had been out in the United States the year before, and she was happy to say she had been able to show him considerable attention. She didn’t know how much he had enjoyed it, but she would undertake to say it had done him good; he wasn’t the same man when he left as he had been when be came. It had opened his eyes and shown him that England wasn’t everything. He had been very much liked in most places, and thought extremely simple–more simple than the English were commonly supposed to be. There were people who had thought him affected; she didn’t know whether they meant that his simplicity was an affectation. Some of his questions were too discouraging; he thought all the chambermaids were farmers’ daughters–or all the farmers’ daughters were chambermaids–she couldn’t exactly remember which. He hadn’t seemed able to grasp the great school system; it had been really too much for him. On the whole he had behaved as if there were too much of everything–as if he could only take in a small part. The part he had chosen was the hotel system and the river navigation. He had seemed really fascinated with the hotels; he had a photograph of every one he had visited. But the river steamers were his principal interest; he wanted to do nothing but sail on the big boats. They had travelled together from New York to Milwaukee, stopping at the most interesting cities on the route; and whenever they started afresh he had wanted to know if they could go by the steamer. He seemed to have no idea of geography–had an impression that Baltimore was a Western city and was perpetually expecting to arrive at the Mississippi. He appeared never to have heard of any river in America but the Mississippi and was unprepared to recognise the existence of the Hudson, though obliged to confess at last that it was fully equal to the Rhine. They had spent some pleasant hours in the palace-cars; he was always ordering ice-cream from the coloured man. He could never get used to that idea–that you could get ice-cream in the cars. Of course you couldn’t, nor fans, nor candy, nor anything in the English cars! He found the heat quite overwhelming, and she had told him she indeed expected it was the biggest he had ever experienced. He was now in England, hunting–“hunting round” Henrietta called it. These amusements were those of the American red men; we had left that behind long ago, the pleasures of the chase. It seemed to be generally believed in England that we wore tomahawks and feathers; but such a costume was more in keeping with English habits. Mr. Bantling would not have time to join her in Italy, but when she should go to Paris again he expected to come over. He wanted very much to see Versailles again; he was very fond of the ancient regime. They didn’t agree about that, but that was what she liked Versailles for, that you could see the ancient regime had been swept away. There were no dukes and marquises there now; she remembered on the contrary one day when there were five American families, walking all round. Mr. Bantling was very anxious that she should take up the subject of England again, and he thought she might get on better with it now; England had changed a good deal within two or three years. He was determined that if she went there he should go to see his sister, Lady Pensil, and that this time the invitation should come to her straight. The mystery about that other one had never been explained.
Caspar Goodwood came at last to Palazzo Roccanera; he had written Isabel a note beforehand, to ask leave. This was promptly granted; she would be at home at six o’clock that afternoon. She spent the day wondering what he was coming for–what good he expected to get of it. He had presented himself hitherto as a person destitute of the faculty of compromise, who would take what he had asked for or take nothing. Isabel’s hospitality, however, raised no questions, and she found no great difficulty in appearing happy enough to deceive him. It was her conviction at least that she deceived him, made him say to himself that he had been misinformed. But she also saw, so she believed, that he was not disappointed, as some other men, she was sure, would have been; he had not come to Rome to look for an opportunity. She never found out what he had come for; he offered her no explanation; there could be none but the very simple one that he wanted to see her. In other words he had come for his amusement. Isabel followed up this induction with a good deal of eagerness, and was delighted to have found a formula that would lay the ghost of this gentleman’s ancient grievance. If he had come to Rome for his amusement this was exactly what she wanted; for if he cared for amusement he had got over his heartache. If he had got over his heartache everything was as it should be and her responsibilities were at an end. It was true that he took his recreation a little stiffly, but he had never been loose and easy and she had every reason to believe he was satisfied with what he saw. Henrietta was not in his confidence, though he was in hers, and Isabel consequently received no side-light upon his state of mind. He was open to little conversation on general topics; it came back to her that she had said of him once, years before, “Mr. Goodwood speaks a good deal, but he doesn’t talk.” He spoke a good deal now, but he talked perhaps as little as ever; considering, that is, how much there was in Rome to talk about. His arrival was not calculated to simplify her relations with her husband, for if Mr. Osmond didn’t like her friends Mr. Goodwood had no claim upon his attention save as having been one of the first of them. There was nothing for her to say of him but that he was the very oldest; this rather meagre synthesis exhausted the facts. She had been obliged to introduce him to Gilbert; it was impossible she should not ask him to dinner, to her Thursday evenings, of which she had grown very weary, but to which her husband still held for the sake not so much of inviting people as of not inviting them.
To the Thursdays Mr. Goodwood came regularly, solemnly, rather early; he appeared to regard them with a good deal of gravity. Isabel every now and then had a moment of anger; there was something so literal about him; she thought he might know that she didn’t know what to do with him. But she couldn’t call him stupid; he was not that in the least; he was only extraordinarily honest. To be as honest as that made a man very different from most people; one had to be almost equally honest with HIM. She made this latter reflection at the very time she was flattering herself she had persuaded him that she was the most light-hearted of women. He never threw any doubt on this point, never asked her any personal questions. He got on much better with Osmond than had seemed probable. Osmond had a great dislike to being counted on; in such a case be had an irresistible need of disappointing you. It was in virtue of this principle that he gave himself the entertainment of taking a fancy to a perpendicular Bostonian whom he bad been depended upon to treat with coldness. He asked Isabel if Mr. Goodwood also had wanted to marry her, and expressed surprise at her not having accepted him. It would have been an excellent thing, like living under some tall belfry which would strike all the hours and make a queer vibration in the upper air. He declared he liked to talk with the great Goodwood; it wasn’t easy at first, you had to climb up an interminable steep staircase up to the top of the tower; but when you got there you had a big view and felt a little fresh breeze. Osmond, as we know, had delightful qualities, and he gave Caspar Goodwood the benefit of them all. Isabel could see that Mr. Goodwood thought better of her husband than he had ever wished to; he had given her the impression that morning in Florence of being inaccessible to a good impression. Gilbert asked him repeatedly to dinner, and Mr. Goodwood smoked a cigar with him afterwards and even desired to be shown his collections. Gilbert said to Isabel that he was very original; he was as strong and of as good a style as an English portmanteau,–he had plenty of straps and buckles which would never wear out, and a capital patent lock. Caspar Goodwood took to riding on the Campagna and devoted much time to this exercise; it was therefore mainly in the evening that Isabel saw him. She bethought herself of saying to him one day that if he were willing he could render her a service. And then she added smiling:
“I don’t know, however, what right I have to ask a service of you.”
“You’re the person in the world who has most right,” he answered. “I’ve given you assurances that I’ve never given any one else.”
The service was that he should go and see her cousin Ralph, who was ill at the Hotel de Paris, alone, and be as kind to him as possible. Mr. Goodwood had never seen him, but he would know who the poor fellow was; if she was not mistaken Ralph had once invited him to Gardencourt. Caspar remembered the invitation perfectly, and, though he was not supposed to be a man of imagination, had enough to put himself in the place of a poor gentleman who lay dying at a Roman inn. He called at the Hotel de Paris and, on being shown into the presence of the master of Gardencourt, found Miss Stackpole sitting beside his sofa. A singular change had in fact occurred in this lady’s relations with Ralph Touchett. She had not been asked by Isabel to go and see him, but on hearing that he was too ill to come out had immediately gone of her own motion. After this she had paid him a daily visit–always under the conviction that they were great enemies. “Oh yes, we’re intimate enemies,” Ralph used to say; and he accused her freely–as freely as the humour of it would allow –of coming to worry him to death. In reality they became excellent friends, Henrietta much wondering that she should never have liked him before. Ralph liked her exactly as much as he had always done; he had never doubted for a moment that she was an excellent fellow. They talked about everything and always differed; about everything, that is, but Isabel–a topic as to which Ralph always had a thin forefinger on his lips. Mr. Bantling on the other hand proved a great resource; Ralph was capable of discussing Mr. Bantling with Henrietta for hours. Discussion was stimulated of course by their inevitable difference of view–Ralph having amused himself with taking the ground that the genial ex-guardsman was a regular Machiavelli. Caspar Goodwood could contribute nothing to such a debate; but after he had been left alone with his host he found there were various other matters they could take up. It must be admitted that the lady who had just gone out was not one of these; Caspar granted all Miss Stackpole’s merits in advance, but had no further remark to make about her. Neither, after the first allusions, did the two men expatiate upon Mrs. Osmond–a theme in which Goodwood perceived as many dangers as Ralph. He felt very sorry for that unclassable personage; he couldn’t bear to see a pleasant man, so pleasant for all his queerness, so beyond anything to be done. There was always something to be done, for Goodwood, and he did it in this case by repeating several times his visit to the Hotel de Paris. It seemed to Isabel that she had been very clever; she had artfully disposed of the superfluous Caspar. She had given him an occupation; she had converted him into a caretaker of Ralph. She had a plan of making him travel northward with her cousin as soon as the first mild weather should allow it. Lord Warburton had brought Ralph to Rome and Mr. Goodwood should take him away. There seemed a happy symmetry in this, and she was now intensely eager that Ralph should depart. She had a constant fear he would die there before her eyes and a horror of the occurrence of this event at an inn, by her door, which he had so rarely entered. Ralph must sink to his last rest in his own dear house, in one of those deep, dim chambers of Gardencourt where the dark ivy would cluster round the edges of the glimmering window. There seemed to Isabel in these days something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past was more perfectly irrecoverable. When she thought of the months she had spent there the tears rose to her eyes. She flattered herself, as I say, upon her ingenuity, but she had need of all she could muster; for several events occurred which seemed to confront and defy her. The Countess Gemini arrived from Florence–arrived with her trunks, her dresses, her chatter, her falsehoods, her frivolity, the strange, the unholy legend of the number of her lovers. Edward Rosier, who had been away somewhere,–no one, not even Pansy, knew where,–reappeared in Rome and began to write her long letters, which she never answered. Madame Merle returned from Naples and said to her with a strange smile: “What on earth did you do with Lord Warburton?” As if it were any business of hers!
CHAPTER XLVIII
One day, toward the end of February, Ralph Touchett made up his mind to return to England. He had his own reasons for this decision, which he was not bound to communicate; but Henrietta Stackpole, to whom he mentioned his intention, flattered herself that she guessed them. She forbore to express them, however; she only said, after a moment, as she sat by his sofa: “I suppose you know you can’t go alone?”
“I’ve no idea of doing that,” Ralph answered. “I shall have people with me.”
“What do you mean by ‘people’? Servants whom you pay?”
“Ah,” said Ralph jocosely, “after all, they’re human beings.”
“Are there any women among them?” Miss Stackpole desired to know.
“You speak as if I had a dozen! No, I confess I haven’t a soubrette in my employment.”
“Well,” said Henrietta calmly, “you can’t go to England that way. You must have a woman’s care.”
“I’ve had so much of yours for the past fortnight that it will last me a good while.”
“You’ve not had enough of it yet. I guess I’ll go with you,” said Henrietta.
“Go with me?” Ralph slowly raised himself from his sofa.
“Yes, I know you don’t like me, but I’ll go with you all the same. It would be better for your health to lie down again.”
Ralph looked at her a little; then he slowly relapsed. “I like you very much,” he said in a moment.
Miss Stackpole gave one of her infrequent laughs. “You needn’t think that by saying that you can buy me off. I’ll go with you, and what is more I’ll take care of you.”
“You’re a very good woman,” said Ralph.
“Wait till I get you safely home before you say that. It won’t be easy. But you had better go, all the same.”
Before she left him, Ralph said to her: “Do you really mean to take care of me?”
“Well, I mean to try.”
“I notify you then that I submit. Oh, I submit!” And it was perhaps a sign of submission that a few minutes after she had left him alone he burst into a loud fit of laughter. It seemed to him so inconsequent, such a conclusive proof of his having abdicated all functions and renounced all exercise, that he should start on a journey across Europe under the supervision of Miss Stackpole. And the great oddity was that the prospect pleased him; he was gratefully, luxuriously passive. He felt even impatient to start; and indeed he had an immense longing to see his own house again. The end of everything was at hand; it seemed to him he could stretch out his arm and touch the goal. But he wanted to die at home; it was the only wish he had left–to extend himself in the large quiet room where he had last seen his father lie, and close his eyes upon the summer dawn.
That same day Caspar Goodwood came to see him, and he informed his visitor that Miss Stackpole had taken him up and was to conduct him back to England. “Ah then,” said Caspar, “I’m afraid I shall be a fifth wheel to the coach. Mrs. Osmond has made me promise to go with you.”
“Good heavens–it’s the golden age! You’re all too kind.”
“The kindness on my part is to her; it’s hardly to you.”
“Granting that, SHE’S kind,” smiled Ralph.
“To get people to go with you? Yes, that’s a sort of kindness,” Goodwood answered without lending himself to the joke. “For myself, however,” he added, “I’ll go so far as to say that I would much rather travel with you and Miss Stackpole than with Miss Stackpole alone.”
“And you’d rather stay here than do either,” said Ralph. “There’s really no need of your coming. Henrietta’s extraordinarily efficient.”
“I’m sure of that. But I’ve promised Mrs. Osmond.”
“You can easily get her to let you off.”
“She wouldn’t let me off for the world. She wants me to look after you, but that isn’t the principal thing. The principal thing is that she wants me to leave Rome.”
“Ah, you see too much in it,” Ralph suggested.
“I bore her,” Goodwood went on; “she has nothing to say to me, so she invented that.”
“Oh then, if it’s a convenience to her I certainly will take you with me. Though I don’t see why it should be a convenience,” Ralph added in a moment.
“Well,” said Caspar Goodwood simply, “she thinks I’m watching her.”
“Watching her?”
“Trying to make out if she’s happy.”
“That’s easy to make out,” said Ralph. “She’s the most visibly happy woman I know.”
“Exactly so; I’m satisfied,” Goodwood answered dryly. For all his dryness, however, he had more to say. “I’ve been watching her; I was an old friend and it seemed to me I had the right. She pretends to be happy; that was what she undertook to be; and I thought I should like to see for myself what it amounts to. I’ve seen,” he continued with a harsh ring in his voice, “and I don’t want to see any more. I’m now quite ready to go.”
“Do you know it strikes me as about time you should?” Ralph rejoined. And this was the only conversation these gentlemen had about Isabel Osmond.
Henrietta made her preparations for departure, and among them she found it proper to say a few words to the Countess Gemini, who returned at Miss Stackpole’s pension the visit which this lady had paid her in Florence.
“You were very wrong about Lord Warburton,” she remarked to the Countess. “I think it right you should know that.”
“About his making love to Isabel? My poor lady, he was at her house three times a day. He has left traces of his passage!” the Countess cried.
“He wished to marry your niece; that’s why he came to the house.”
The Countess stared, and then with an inconsiderate laugh: “Is that the story that Isabel tells? It isn’t bad, as such things go. If he wishes to marry my niece, pray why doesn’t he do it? Perhaps he has gone to buy the wedding-ring and will come back with it next month, after I’m gone.”
“No, he’ll not come back. Miss Osmond doesn’t wish to marry him.”
“She’s very accommodating! I knew she was fond of Isabel, but I didn’t know she carried it so far.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Henrietta coldly, and reflecting that the Countess was unpleasantly perverse. “I really must stick to my point–that Isabel never encouraged the attentions of Lord Warburton.”
“My dear friend, what do you and I know about it? All we know is that my brother’s capable of everything.”
“I don’t know what your brother’s capable of,” said Henrietta with dignity.
“It’s not her encouraging Warburton that I complain of; it’s her sending him away. I want particularly to see him. Do you suppose she thought I would make him faithless?” the Countess continued with audacious insistence. “However, she’s only keeping him, one can feel that. The house is full of him there; he’s quite in the air. Oh yes, he has left traces; I’m sure I shall see him yet.”
“Well,” said Henrietta after a little, with one of those inspirations which had made the fortune of her letters to the Interviewer, “perhaps he’ll be more successful with you than with Isabel!”
When she told her friend of the offer she had made Ralph Isabel replied that she could have done nothing that would have pleased her more. It had always been her faith that at bottom Ralph and this young woman were made to understand each other. “I don’t care whether he understands me or not,” Henrietta declared. “The great thing is that he shouldn’t die in the cars.”
“He won’t do that,” Isabel said, shaking her head with an extension of faith.
“He won’t if I can help it. I see you want us all to go. I don’t know what you want to do.”
“I want to be alone,” said Isabel.
“You won’t be that so long as you’ve so much company at home.”
“Ah, they’re part of the comedy. You others are spectators.”
“Do you call it a comedy, Isabel Archer?” Henrietta rather grimly asked.
“The tragedy then if you like. You’re all looking at me; it makes me uncomfortable.”
Henrietta engaged in this act for a while. “You’re like the stricken deer, seeking the innermost shade. Oh, you do give me such a sense of helplessness!” she broke out.
“I’m not at all helpless. There are many things I mean to do.”
“It’s not you I’m speaking of; it’s myself. It’s too much, having come on purpose, to leave you just as I find you.”
“You don’t do that; you leave me much refreshed,” Isabel said.
“Very mild refreshment–sour lemonade! I want you to promise me something.”
“I can’t do that. I shall never make another promise. I made such a solemn one four years ago, and I’ve succeeded so ill in keeping it.”
“You’ve had no encouragement. In this case I should give you the greatest. Leave your husband before the worst comes; that’s what I want you to promise.”
“The worst? What do you call the worst?”
“Before your character gets spoiled.”
“Do you mean my disposition? It won’t get spoiled,” Isabel answered, smiling. “I’m taking very good care of it. I’m extremely struck,” she added, turning away, “with the off-hand way in which you speak of a woman’s leaving her husband. It’s easy to see you’ve never had one!”
“Well,” said Henrietta as if she were beginning an argument, “nothing is more common in our Western cities, and it’s to them, after all, that we must look in the future.” Her argument, however, does not concern this history, which has too many other threads to unwind. She announced to Ralph Touchett that she was ready to leave Rome by any train he might designate, and Ralph immediately pulled himself together for departure. Isabel went to see him at the last, and he made the same remark that Henrietta had made. It struck him that Isabel was uncommonly glad to get rid of them all.
For all answer to this she gently laid her hand on his, and said in a low tone, with a quick smile: “My dear Ralph–!”
It was answer enough, and he was quite contented. But he went on in the same way, jocosely, ingenuously: “I’ve seen less of you than I might, but it’s better than nothing. And then I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“I don’t know from whom, leading the life you’ve done.”
“From the voices of the air! Oh, from no one else; I never let other people speak of you. They always say you’re ‘charming,’ and that’s so flat.”
“I might have seen more of you certainly,” Isabel said. “But when one’s married one has so much occupation.”
“Fortunately I’m not married. When you come to see me in England I shall be able to entertain you with all the freedom of a bachelor.” He continued to talk as if they should certainly meet again, and succeeded in making the assumption appear almost just. He made no allusion to his term being near, to the probability that he should not outlast the summer. If he preferred it so, Isabel was willing enough; the reality was sufficiently distinct without their erecting finger-posts in conversation. That had been well enough for the earlier time, though about this, as about his other affairs, Ralph had never been egotistic. Isabel spoke of his journey, of the stages into which he should divide it, of the precautions he should take. “Henrietta’s my greatest precaution,” he went on. “The conscience of that woman’s sublime.”
“Certainly she’ll be very conscientious.”
“Will be? She has been! It’s only because she thinks it’s her duty that she goes with me. There’s a conception of duty for you.”
“Yes, it’s a generous one,” said Isabel, “and it makes me deeply ashamed. I ought to go with you, you know.”
“Your husband wouldn’t like that.”
“No, he wouldn’t like it. But I might go, all the same.”
“I’m startled by the boldness of your imagination. Fancy my being a cause of disagreement between a lady and her husband!”
“That’s why I don’t go,” said Isabel simply–yet not very lucidly.
Ralph understood well enough, however. “I should think so, with all those occupations you speak of.”
“It isn’t that. I’m afraid,” said Isabel. After a pause she repeated, as if to make herself, rather than him, hear the words: “I’m afraid.”
Ralph could hardly tell what her tone meant; it was so strangely deliberate–apparently so void of emotion. Did she wish to do public penance for a fault of which she had not been convicted? or were her words simply an attempt at enlightened self-analysis? However this might be, Ralph could not resist so easy an opportunity. “Afraid of your husband?”
“Afraid of myself!” she said, getting up. She stood there a moment and then added: “If I were afraid of my husband that would be simply my duty. That’s what women are expected to be.”
“Ah yes,” laughed Ralph; “but to make up for it there’s always some man awfully afraid of some woman!”
She gave no heed to this pleasantry, but suddenly took a different turn. “With Henrietta at the head of your little band,” she exclaimed abruptly, “there will be nothing left for Mr. Goodwood!”
“Ah, my dear Isabel,” Ralph answered, “he’s used to that. There is nothing left for Mr. Goodwood.”
She coloured and then observed, quickly, that she must leave him. They stood together a moment; both her hands were in both of his. “You’ve been my best friend,” she said.
“It was for you that I wanted–that I wanted to live. But I’m of no use to you.”
Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept that; she could not part with him that way. “If you should send for me I’d come,” she said at last.
“Your husband won’t consent to that.”
“Oh yes, I can arrange it.”
“I shall keep that for my last pleasure!” said Ralph.
In answer to which she simply kissed him. It was a Thursday, and that evening Caspar Goodwood came to Palazzo Roccanera. He was among the first to arrive, and he spent some time in conversation with Gilbert Osmond, who almost always was present when his wife received. They sat down together, and Osmond, talkative, communicative, expansive, seemed possessed with a kind of intellectual gaiety. He leaned back with his legs crossed, lounging and chatting, while Goodwood, more restless, but not at all lively, shifted his position, played with his hat, made the little sofa creak beneath him. Osmond’s face wore a sharp, aggressive smile; he was as a man whose perceptions have been quickened by good news. He remarked to Goodwood that he was sorry they were to lose him; he himself should particularly miss him. He saw so few intelligent men–they were surprisingly scarce in Rome. He must be sure to come back; there was something very refreshing, to an inveterate Italian like himself, in talking with a genuine outsider.
“I’m very fond of Rome, you know,” Osmond said; “but there’s nothing I like better than to meet people who haven’t that superstition. The modern world’s after all very fine. Now you’re thoroughly modern and yet are not at all common. So many of the moderns we see are such very poor stuff. If they’re the children of the future we’re willing to die young. Of course the ancients too are often very tiresome. My wife and I like everything that’s really new–not the mere pretence of it. There’s nothing new, unfortunately, in ignorance and stupidity. We see plenty of that in forms that offer themselves as a revelation of progress, of light. A revelation of vulgarity! There’s a certain kind of vulgarity which I believe is really new; I don’t think there ever was anything like it before. Indeed I don’t find vulgarity, at all, before the present century. You see a faint menace of it here and there in the last, but to-day the air has grown so dense that delicate things are literally not recognised. Now, we’ve liked you–!” With which he hesitated a moment, laying his hand gently on Goodwood’s knee and smiling with a mixture of assurance and embarrassment. “I’m going to say something extremely offensive and patronising, but you must let me have the satisfaction of it. We’ve liked you because–because you’ve reconciled us a little to the future. If there are to be a certain number of people like you–a la bonne heure! I’m talking for my wife as well as for myself, you see. She speaks for me, my wife; why shouldn’t I speak for her? We’re as united, you know, as the candlestick and the snuffers. Am I assuming too much when I say that I think I’ve understood from you that your occupations have been–a– commercial? There’s a danger in that, you know; but it’s the way you have escaped that strikes us. Excuse me if my little compliment seems in execrable taste; fortunately my wife doesn’t hear me. What I mean is that you might have been–a–what I was mentioning just now. The whole American world was in a conspiracy to make you so. But you resisted, you’ve something about you that saved you. And yet you’re so modern, so modern; the most modern man we know! We shall always be delighted to see you again.”
I have said that Osmond was in good humour, and these remarks will give ample evidence of the fact. They were infinitely more personal than he usually cared to be, and if Caspar Goodwood had attended to them more closely he might have thought that the defence of delicacy was in rather odd hands. We may believe, however, that Osmond knew very well what he was about, and that if he chose to use the tone of patronage with a grossness not in his habits he had an excellent reason for the escapade. Goodwood had only a vague sense that he was laying it on somehow; he scarcely knew where the mixture was applied. Indeed he scarcely knew what Osmond was talking about; he wanted to be alone with Isabel, and that idea spoke louder to him than her husband’s perfectly-pitched voice. He watched her talking with other people and wondered when she would be at liberty and whether he might ask her to go into one of the other rooms. His humour was not, like Osmond’s, of the best; there was an element of dull rage in his consciousness of things. Up to this time he had not disliked Osmond personally; he had only thought him very well-informed and obliging and more than he had supposed like the person whom Isabel Archer would naturally marry. His host had won in the open field a great advantage over him, and Goodwood had too strong a sense of fair play to have been moved to underrate him on that account. He had not tried positively to think well of him; this was a flight of sentimental benevolence of which, even in the days when he came nearest to reconciling himself to what had happened, Goodwood was quite incapable. He accepted him as rather a brilliant personage of the amateurish kind, afflicted with a redundancy of leisure which it amused him to work off in little refinements of conversation. But he only half trusted him; he could never make out why the deuce Osmond should lavish refinements of any sort upon HIM. It made him suspect that he found some private entertainment in it, and it ministered to a general impression that his triumphant rival had in his composition a streak of perversity. He knew indeed that Osmond could have no reason to wish him evil; he had nothing to fear from him. He had carried off a supreme advantage and could afford to be kind to a man who had lost everything. It was true that Goodwood had at times grimly wished he were dead and would have liked to kill him; but Osmond had no means of knowing this, for practice had made the younger man perfect in the art of appearing inaccessible to-day to any violent emotion. He cultivated this art in order to deceive himself, but it was others that he deceived first. He cultivated it, moreover, with very limited success; of which there could be no better proof than the deep, dumb irritation that reigned in his soul when he heard Osmond speak of his wife’s feelings as if he were commissioned to answer for them.
That was all he had had an ear for in what his host said to him this evening; he had been conscious that Osmond made more of a point even than usual of referring to the conjugal harmony prevailing at Palazzo Roccanera. He had been more careful than ever to speak as if he and his wife had all things in sweet community and it were as natural to each of them to say “we” as to say “I”. In all this there was an air of intention that had puzzled and angered our poor Bostonian, who could only reflect for his comfort that Mrs. Osmond’s relations with her husband were none of his business. He had no proof whatever that her husband misrepresented her, and if he judged her by the surface of things was bound to believe that she liked her life. She had never given him the faintest sign of discontent. Miss Stackpole had told him that she had lost her illusions, but writing for the papers had made Miss Stackpole sensational. She was too fond of early news. Moreover, since her arrival in Rome she had been much on her guard; she had pretty well ceased to flash her lantern at him. This indeed, it may be said for her, would have been quite against her conscience. She had now seen the reality of Isabel’s situation, and it had inspired her with a just reserve. Whatever could be done to improve it the most useful form of assistance would not be to inflame her former lovers with a sense of her wrongs. Miss Stackpole continued to take a deep interest in the state of Mr. Goodwood’s feelings, but she showed it at present only by sending him choice extracts, humorous and other, from the American journals, of which she received several by every post and which she always perused with a pair of scissors in her hand. The articles she cut out she placed in an envelope addressed to Mr. Goodwood, which she left with her own hand at his hotel. He never asked her a question about Isabel: hadn’t he come five thousand miles to see for himself? He was thus not in the least authorised to think Mrs. Osmond unhappy; but the very absence of authorisation operated as an irritant, ministered to the harsh- ness with which, in spite of his theory that he had ceased to care, he now recognised that, so far as she was concerned, the future had nothing more for him. He had not even the satisfaction of knowing the truth; apparently he could not even be trusted to respect her if she WERE unhappy. He was hopeless, helpless, useless. To this last character she had called his attention by her ingenious plan for making him leave Rome. He had no objection whatever to doing what he could for her cousin, but it made him grind his teeth to think that of all the services she might have asked of him this was the one she had been eager to select. There had been no danger of her choosing one that would have kept him in Rome.
To-night what he was chiefly thinking of was that he was to leave her to-morrow and that he had gained nothing by coming but the knowledge that he was as little wanted as ever. About herself he had gained no knowledge; she was imperturbable, inscrutable, impenetrable. He felt the old bitterness, which he had tried so hard to swallow, rise again in his throat, and he knew there are disappointments that last as long as life. Osmond went on talking; Goodwood was vaguely aware that he was touching again upon his perfect intimacy with his wife. It seemed to him for a moment that the man had a kind of demonic imagination; it was impossible that without malice he should have selected so unusual a topic. But what did it matter, after all, whether he were demonic or not, and whether she loved him or hated him? She might hate him to the death without one’s gaining a straw one’s self. “You travel, by the by, with Ralph Touchett,” Osmond said. “I suppose that means you’ll move slowly?”
“I don’t know. I shall do just as he likes.”
“You’re very accommodating. We’re immensely obliged to you; you must really let me say it. My wife has probably expressed to you what we feel. Touchett has been on our minds all winter; it has looked more than once as if he would never leave Rome. He ought never to have come; it’s worse than an imprudence for people in that state to travel; it’s a kind of indelicacy. I wouldn’t for the world be under such an obligation to Touchett as he has been to–to my wife and me. Other people inevitably have to look after him, and every one isn’t so generous as you.”
“I’ve nothing else to do,” Caspar said dryly.
Osmond looked at him a moment askance. “You ought to marry, and then you’d have plenty to do! It’s true that in that case you wouldn’t be quite so available for deeds of mercy.”
“Do you find that as a married man you’re so much occupied?” the young man mechanically asked.
“Ah, you see, being married’s in itself an occupation. It isn’t always active; it’s often passive; but that takes even more attention. Then my wife and I do so many things together. We read, we study, we make music, we walk, we drive–we talk even, as when we first knew each other. I delight, to this hour, in my wife’s conversation. If you’re ever bored take my advice and get married. Your wife indeed may bore you, in that case; but you’ll never bore yourself. You’ll always have something to say to yourself–always have a subject of reflection.”
“I’m not bored,” said Goodwood. “I’ve plenty to think about and to say to myself.”
“More than to say to others!” Osmond exclaimed with a light laugh. “Where shall you go next? I mean after you’ve consigned Touchett to his natural caretakers–I believe his mother’s at last coming back to look after him. That little lady’s superb; she neglects her duties with a finish–! Perhaps you’ll spend the summer in England?”
“I don’t know. I’ve no plans.”
“Happy man! That’s a little bleak, but it’s very free.”
“Oh yes, I’m very free.”
“Free to come back to Rome I hope,” said Osmond as he saw a group of new visitors enter the room. “Remember that when you do come we count on you!”
Goodwood had meant to go away early, but the evening elapsed without his having a chance to speak to Isabel otherwise than as one of several associated interlocutors. There was something perverse in the inveteracy with which she avoided him; his unquenchable rancour discovered an intention where there was certainly no appearance of one. There was absolutely no appearance of one. She met his eyes with her clear hospitable smile, which seemed almost to ask that he would come and help her to entertain some of her visitors. To such suggestions, however, he opposed but a stiff impatience. He wandered about and waited; he talked to the few people he knew, who found him for the first time rather self-contradictory. This was indeed rare with Caspar Goodwood, though he often contradicted others. There was often music at Palazzo Roccanera, and it was usually very good. Under cover of the music he managed to contain himself; but toward the end, when he saw the people beginning to go, he drew near to Isabel and asked her in a low tone if he might not speak to her in one of the other rooms, which he had just assured himself was empty. She smiled as if she wished to oblige him but found her self absolutely prevented. “I’m afraid it’s impossible. People are saying good-night, and I must be where they can see me.”
“I shall wait till they are all gone then.”
She hesitated a moment. “Ah, that will be delightful!” she exclaimed.
And he waited, though it took a long time yet. There were several people, at the end, who seemed tethered to the carpet. The Countess Gemini, who was never herself till midnight, as she said, displayed no consciousness that the entertainment was over; she had still a little circle of gentlemen in front of the fire, who every now and then broke into a united laugh. Osmond had disappeared–he never bade good-bye to people; and as the Countess was extending her range, according to her custom at this period of the evening, Isabel had sent Pansy to bed. Isabel sat a little apart; she too appeared to wish her sister-in-law would sound a lower note and let the last loiterers depart in peace.
“May I not say a word to you now?” Goodwood presently asked her. She got up immediately, smiling. “Certainly, we’ll go somewhere else if you like.” They went together, leaving the Countess with her little circle, and for a moment after they had crossed the threshold neither of them spoke. Isabel would not sit down; she stood in the middle of the room slowly fanning herself; she had for him the same familiar grace. She seemed to wait for him to speak. Now that he was alone with her all the passion he had never stifled surged into his senses; it hummed in his eyes and made things swim round him. The bright, empty room grew dim and blurred, and through the heaving veil he felt her hover before him with gleaming eyes and parted lips. If he had seen more distinctly he would have perceived her smile was fixed and a trifle forced–that she was frightened at what she saw in his own face. “I suppose you wish to bid me goodbye?” she said.
“Yes–but I don’t like it. I don’t want to leave Rome,” he answered with almost plaintive honesty.
“I can well imagine. It’s wonderfully good of you. I can’t tell you how kind I think you.”
For a moment more he said nothing. “With a few words like that you make me go.”
“You must come back some day,” she brightly returned.
“Some day? You mean as long a time hence as possible.”
“Oh no; I don’t mean all that.”
“What do you mean? I don’t understand! But I said I’d go, and I’ll go,” Goodwood added.
“Come back whenever you like,” said Isabel with attempted lightness.
“I don’t care a straw for your cousin!” Caspar broke out.
“Is that what you wished to tell me?”
“No, no; I didn’t want to tell you anything; I wanted to ask you–” he paused a moment, and then–“what have you really made of your life?” he said, in a low, quick tone. He paused again, as if for an answer; but she said nothing, and he went on: “I can’t understand, I can’t penetrate you! What am I to believe– what do you want me to think?” Still she said nothing; she only stood looking at him, now quite without pretending to ease. “I’m told you’re unhappy, and if you are I should like to know it. That would be something for me. But you yourself say you’re happy, and you’re somehow so still, so smooth, so hard. You’re completely changed. You conceal everything; I haven’t really come near you.”
“You come very near,” Isabel said gently, but in a tone of warning.
“And yet I don’t touch you! I want to know the truth. Have you done well?”
“You ask a great deal.”
“Yes–I’ve always asked a great deal. Of course you won’t tell me. I shall never know if you can help it. And then it’s none of my business.” He had spoken with a visible effort to control himself, to give a considerate form to an inconsiderate state of mind. But the sense that it was his last chance, that he loved her and had lost her, that she would think him a fool whatever he should say, suddenly gave him a lash and added a deep vibration to his low voice. “You’re perfectly inscrutable, and that’s what makes me think you’ve something to hide. I tell you I don’t care a straw for your cousin, but I don’t mean that I don’t like him. I mean that it isn’t because I like him that I go away with him. I’d go if he were an idiot and you should have asked me. If you should ask me I’d go to Siberia tomorrow. Why do you want me to leave the place? You must have some reason for that; if you were as contented as you pretend you are you wouldn’t care. I’d rather know the truth about you, even if it’s damnable, than have come here for nothing. That isn’t what I came for. I thought I shouldn’t care. I came because I wanted to assure myself that I needn’t think of you any more. I haven’t thought of anything else, and you’re quite right to wish me to go away. But if I must go, there’s no harm in my letting myself out for a single moment, is there? If you’re really hurt–if HE hurts you–nothing I say will hurt you. When I tell you I love you it’s simply what I came for. I thought it was for something else; but it was for that. I shouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe I should never see you again. It’s the last time–let me pluck a single flower! I’ve no right to say that, I know; and you’ve no right to listen. But you don’t listen; you never listen, you’re always thinking of something else. After this I must go, of course; so I shall at least have a reason. Your asking me is no reason, not a real one. I can’t judge by your husband,” he went on irrelevantly, almost incoherently; “I don’t understand him; he tells me you adore each other. Why does he tell me that? What business is it of mine? When I say that to you, you look strange. But you always look strange. Yes, you’ve something to hide. It’s none of my business –very true. But I love you,” said Caspar Goodwood.
As he said, she looked strange. She turned her eyes to the door by which they had entered and raised her fan as if in warning.
“You’ve behaved so well; don’t spoil it,” she uttered softly.
“No one hears me. It’s wonderful what you tried to put me off with. I love you as I’ve never loved you.”
“I know it. I knew it as soon as you consented to go.”
“You can’t help it–of course not. You would if you could, but you can’t, unfortunately. Unfortunately for me, I mean. I ask nothing –nothing, that is, I shouldn’t. But I do ask one sole satisfaction:–that you tell me–that you tell me–!”
“That I tell you what?”
“Whether I may pity you.”
“Should you like that?” Isabel asked, trying to smile again.
“To pity you? Most assuredly! That at least would be doing something. I’d give my life to it.”
She raised her fan to her face, which it covered all except her eyes. They rested a moment on his. “Don’t give your life to it; but give a thought to it every now and then.” And with that she went back to the Countess Gemini.
CHAPTER XLIX
Madame Merle had not made her appearance at Palazzo Roccanera on the evening of that Thursday of which I have narrated some of the incidents, and Isabel, though she observed her absence, was not surprised by it. Things had passed between them which added no stimulus to sociability, and to appreciate which we must glance a little backward. It has been mentioned that Madame Merle returned from Naples shortly after Lord Warburton had left Rome, and that on her first meeting with Isabel (whom, to do her justice, she came immediately to see) her first utterance had been an enquiry as to the whereabouts of this nobleman, for whom she appeared to hold her dear friend accountable.
“Please don’t talk of him,” said Isabel for answer; “we’ve heard so much of him of late.”
Madame Merle bent her head on one side a little, protestingly, and smiled at the left corner of her mouth. “You’ve heard, yes. But you must remember that I’ve not, in Naples. I hoped to find him here and to be able to congratulate Pansy.”
“You may congratulate Pansy still; but not on marrying Lord Warburton.”
“How you say that! Don’t you know I had set my heart on it?” Madame Merle asked with a great deal of spirit, but still with the intonation of good-humour.
Isabel was discomposed, but she was determined to be good-humoured too. “You shouldn’t have gone to Naples then. You should have stayed here to watch the affair.”
“I had too much confidence in you. But do you think it’s too late?”
“You had better ask Pansy,” said Isabel.
“I shall ask her what you’ve said to her.”
These words seemed to justify the impulse of self-defence aroused on Isabel’s part by her perceiving that her visitor’s attitude was a critical one. Madame Merle, as we know, had been very discreet hitherto; she had never criticised; she had been markedly afraid of intermeddling. But apparently she had only reserved herself for this occasion, since she now had a dangerous quickness in her eye and an air of irritation which even her admirable ease was not able to transmute. She had suffered a disappointment which excited Isabel’s surprise–our heroine having no knowledge of her zealous interest in Pansy’s marriage; and she betrayed it in a manner which quickened Mrs. Osmond’s alarm. More clearly than ever before Isabel heard a cold, mocking voice proceed from she knew not where, in the dim void that surrounded her, and declare that this bright, strong, definite, worldly woman, this incarnation of the practical, the personal, the immediate, was a powerful agent in her destiny. She was nearer to her than Isabel had yet discovered, and her nearness was not the charming accident she had so long supposed. The sense of accident indeed had died within her that day when she happened to be struck with the manner in which the wonderful lady and her own husband sat together in private. No definite suspicion had as yet taken its place; but it was enough to make her view this friend with a different eye, to have been led to reflect that there was more intention in her past behaviour than she had allowed for at the time. Ah yes, there had been intention, there had been intention, Isabel said to herself; and she seemed to wake from a long pernicious dream. What was it that brought home to her that Madame Merle’s intention had not been good? Nothing but the mistrust which had lately taken body and which married itself now to the fruitful wonder produced by her visitor’s challenge on behalf of poor Pansy. There was something in this challenge which had at the very outset excited an answering defiance; a nameless vitality which she could see to have been absent from her friend’s professions of delicacy and caution. Madame Merle had been unwilling to interfere, certainly, but only so long as there was nothing to interfere with. It will perhaps seem to the reader that Isabel went fast in casting doubt, on mere suspicion, on a sincerity proved by several years of good offices. She moved quickly indeed, and with reason, for a strange truth was filtering into her soul. Madame Merle’s interest was identical with Osmond’s: that was enough. “I think Pansy will tell you nothing that will make you more angry,” she said in answer to her companion’s last remark.
“I’m not in the least angry. I’ve only a great desire to retrieve the situation. Do you consider that Warburton has left us for ever?”
“I can’t tell you; I don’t understand you. It’s all over; please let it rest. Osmond has talked to me a great deal about it, and I’ve nothing more to say or to hear. I’ve no doubt,” Isabel added, “that he’ll be very happy to discuss the subject with you.”
“I know what he thinks; he came to see me last evening.”
“As soon as you had arrived? Then you know all about it and you needn’t apply to me for information.”
“It isn’t information I want. At bottom it’s sympathy. I had set my heart on that marriage; the idea did what so few things do– it satisfied the imagination.”
“Your imagination, yes. But not that of the persons concerned.”
“You mean by that of course that I’m not concerned. Of course not directly. But when one’s such an old friend one can’t help having something at stake. You forget how long I’ve known Pansy. You mean, of course,” Madame Merle added, “that YOU are one of the persons concerned.”
“No; that’s the last thing I mean. I’m very weary of it all.”
Madame Merle hesitated a little. “Ah yes, your work’s done.”
“Take care what you say,” said Isabel very gravely.
“Oh, I take care; never perhaps more than when it appears least. Your husband judges you severely.”
Isabel made for a moment no answer to this; she felt choked with bitterness. It was not the insolence of Madame Merle’s informing her that Osmond had been taking her into his confidence as against his wife that struck her most; for she was not quick to believe that this was meant for insolence. Madame Merle was very rarely insolent, and only when it was exactly right. It was not right now, or at least it was not right yet. What touched Isabel like a drop of corrosive acid upon an open wound was the knowledge that Osmond dishonoured her in his words as well as in his thoughts. “Should you like to know how I judge HIM?” she asked at last.
“No, because you’d never tell me. And it would be painful for me to know.”
There was a pause, and for the first time since she had known her Isabel thought Madame Merle disagreeable. She wished she would leave her. “Remember how attractive Pansy is, and don’t despair,” she said abruptly, with a desire that this should close their interview.
But Madame Merle’s expansive presence underwent no contraction. She only gathered her mantle about her and, with the movement, scattered upon the air a faint, agreeable fragrance. “I don’t despair; I feel encouraged. And I didn’t come to scold you; I came if possible to learn the truth. I know you’ll tell it if I ask you. It’s an immense blessing with you that one can count upon that. No, you won’t believe what a comfort I take in it.”
“What truth do you speak of?” Isabel asked, wondering.
“Just this: whether Lord Warburton changed his mind quite of his own movement or because you recommended it. To please himself I mean, or to please you. Think of the confidence I must still have in you, in spite of having lost a little of it,” Madame Merle continued with a smile, “to ask such a question as that!” She sat looking at her friend, to judge the effect of her words, and then went on: “Now don’t be heroic, don’t be unreasonable, don’t take offence. It seems to me I do you an honour in speaking so. I don’t know another woman to whom I would do it. I haven’t the least idea that any other woman would tell me the truth. And don’t you see how well it is that your husband should know it? It’s true that he doesn’t appear to have had any tact whatever in trying to extract it; he has indulged in gratuitous suppositions. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it would make a difference in his view of his daughter’s prospects to know distinctly what really occurred. If Lord Warburton simply got tired of the poor child, that’s one thing, and it’s a pity. If he gave her up to please you it’s another. That’s a pity too, but in a different way. Then, in the latter case, you’d perhaps resign yourself to not being pleased–to simply seeing your step-daughter married. Let him off–let us have him!”
Madame Merle had proceeded very deliberately, watching her companion and apparently thinking she could proceed safely. As she went on Isabel grew pale; she clasped her hands more tightly in her lap. It was not that her visitor had at last thought it the right time to be insolent; for this was not what was most apparent. It was a worse horror than that. “Who are you–what are you?” Isabel murmured. “What have you to do with my husband?” It was strange that for the moment she drew as near to him as if she had loved him.
“Ah then, you take it heroically! I’m very sorry. Don’t think, however, that I shall do so.”
“What have you to do with me?” Isabel went on.
Madame Merle slowly got up, stroking her muff, but not removing her eyes from Isabel’s face. “Everything!” she answered.
Isabel sat there looking up at her, without rising; her face was almost a prayer to be enlightened. But the light of this woman’s eyes seemed only a darkness. “Oh misery!” she murmured at last; and she fell back, covering her face with her hands. It had come over her like a high-surging wave that Mrs. Touchett was right. Madame Merle had married her. Before she uncovered her face again that lady had left the room.
Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation. Pansy, as we know, was almost always her companion, and of late the Countess Gemini, balancing a pink parasol, had lent brilliancy to their equipage; but she still occasionally found herself alone when it suited her mood and where it suited the place. On such occasions she had several resorts; the most accessible of which perhaps was a seat on the low parapet which edges the wide grassy space before the high, cold front of Saint John Lateran, whence you look across the Campagna at the far-trailing outline of the Alban Mount and at that mighty plain, between, which is still so full of all that has passed from it. After the departure of her cousin and his companions she roamed more than usual; she carried her sombre spirit from one familiar shrine to the other. Even when Pansy and the Countess were with her she felt the touch of a vanished world. The carriage, leaving the walls of Rome behind, rolled through narrow lanes where the wild honeysuckle had begun to tangle itself in the hedges, or waited for her in quiet places where the fields lay near, while she strolled further and further over the flower-freckled turf, or sat on a stone that had once had a use and gazed through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene–at the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the hills where the cloud-shadows had the lightness of a blush.
On the afternoon I began with speaking of, she had taken a resolution not to think of Madame Merle; but the resolution proved vain, and this lady’s image hovered constantly before her. She asked herself, with an almost childlike horror of the supposition, whether to this intimate friend of several years the great historical epithet of wicked were to be applied. She knew the idea only by the Bible and other literary works; to the best of her belief she had had no personal acquaintance with wickedness. She had desired a large acquaintance with human life, and in spite of her having flattered herself that she cultivated it with some success this elementary privilege had been denied her. Perhaps it was not wicked–in the historic sense–to be even deeply false; for that was what Madame Merle had been–deeply, deeply, deeply. Isabel’s Aunt Lydia had made this discovery long before, and had mentioned it to her niece; but Isabel had flattered herself at this time that she had a much richer view of things, especially of the spontaneity of her own career and the nobleness of her own interpretations, than poor stiffly-reasoning Mrs. Touchett. Madame Merle had done what she wanted; she had brought about the union of her two friends; a reflection which could not fail to make it a matter of wonder that she should so much have desired such an event. There were people who had the match-making passion, like the votaries of art for art; but Madame Merle, great artist as she was, was scarcely one of these. She thought too ill of marriage, too ill even of life; she had desired that particular marriage but had not desired others. She had therefore had a conception of gain, and Isabel asked herself where she had found her profit. It took her naturally a long time to discover, and even then her discovery was imperfect. It came back to her that Madame Merle, though she had seemed to like her from their first meeting at Gardencourt, had been doubly affectionate after Mr. Touchett’s death and after learning that her young friend had been subject to the good old man’s charity. She had found her profit not in the gross device of borrowing money, but in the more refined idea of introducing one of her intimates to the young woman’s fresh and ingenuous fortune. She had naturally chosen her closest intimate, and it was already vivid enough to Isabel that Gilbert occupied this position. She found herself confronted in this manner with the conviction that the man in the world whom she had supposed to be the least sordid had married her, like a vulgar adventurer, for her money. Strange to say, it had never before occurred to her; if she had thought a good deal of harm of Osmond she had not done him this particular injury. This was the worst she could think of, and she had been saying to herself that the worst was still to come. A man might marry a woman for her money perfectly well; the thing was often done. But at least he should let her know. She wondered whether, since he had wanted her money, her money would now satisfy him. Would he take her money and let her go Ah, if Mr. Touchett’s great charity would but help her to-day it would be blessed indeed! It was not slow to occur to her that if Madame Merle had wished to do Gilbert a service his recognition to her of the boon must have lost its warmth. What must be his feelings to-day in regard to his too zealous benefactress, and what expression must they have found on the part of such a master of irony? It is a singular, but a characteristic, fact that before Isabel returned from her silent drive she had broken its silence by the soft exclamation: “Poor, poor Madame Merle!”
Her compassion would perhaps have been justified if on this same afternoon she had been concealed behind one of the valuable curtains of time-softened damask which dressed the interesting little salon of the lady to whom it referred; the carefully-arranged apartment to which we once paid a visit in company with the discreet Mr. Rosier. In that apartment, towards six o’clock, Gilbert Osmond was seated, and his hostess stood before him as Isabel had seen her stand on an occasion commemorated in this history with an emphasis appropriate not so much to its apparent as to its real importance.
“I don’t believe you’re unhappy; I believe you like it,” said Madame Merle.
“Did I say I was unhappy?” Osmond asked with a face grave enough to suggest that he might have been.
“No, but you don’t say the contrary, as you ought in common gratitude.”
“Don’t talk about gratitude,” he returned dryly. “And don’t aggravate me,” he added in a moment.
Madame Merle slowly seated herself, with her arms folded and her white hands arranged as a support to one of them and an ornament, as it were, to the other. She looked exquisitely calm but impressively sad. “On your side, don’t try to frighten me. I wonder if you guess some of my thoughts.”
“I trouble about them no more than I can help. I’ve quite enough of my own.”
“That’s because they’re so delightful.”
Osmond rested his head against the back of his chair and looked at his companion with a cynical directness which seemed also partly an expression of fatigue. “You do aggravate me,” he remarked in a moment. “I’m very tired.”
“Eh moi donc!” cried Madame Merle.
“With you it’s because you fatigue yourself. With me it’s not my own fault.”
“When I fatigue myself it’s for you. I’ve given you an interest. That’s a great gift.”
“Do you call it an interest?” Osmond enquired with detachment.
“Certainly, since it helps you to pass your time.”
“The time has never seemed longer to me than this winter.”
“You’ve never looked better; you’ve never been so agreeable, so brilliant.”
“Damn my brilliancy!” he thoughtfully murmured. “How little, after all, you know me!”
“If I don’t know you I know nothing,” smiled Madame Merle. “You’ve the feeling of complete success.”
“No, I shall not have that till I’ve made you stop judging me.”