Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during this interval that we are closely concerned with her; our attention is engaged again on a certain day in the late spring-time, shortly after her return to Palazzo Crescentini and a year from the date of the incidents just narrated. She was alone on this occasion, in one of the smaller of the numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses, and there was that in her expression and attitude which would have suggested that she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open, and though its green shutters were partly drawn the bright air of the garden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with warmth and perfume. Our young woman stood near it for some time, her hands clasped behind her; she gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest. Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle. Yet it could not be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged, she would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before. She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined themselves to retrospect, instead of fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would have evoked a multitude of interesting pictures. These pictures would have been both landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have been the more numerous. With several of the images that might have been projected on such a field we are already acquainted. There would be for instance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine’s sister and Edmund Ludlow’s wife, who had come out from New York to spend five months with her relative. She had left her husband behind her, but had brought her children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and tenderness the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had been able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossing the ocean with extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladies in Paris before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet, even from the American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age; so that while her sister was with her Isabel had confined her movements to a narrow circle. Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland in the month of July, and they had spent a summer of fine weather in an Alpine valley where the flowers were thick in the meadows and the shade of great chestnuts made a resting-place for such upward wanderings as might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. They had afterwards reached the French capital, which was worshipped, and with costly ceremonies, by Lily, but thought of as noisily vacant by Isabel, who in these days made use of her memory of Rome as she might have done, in a hot and crowded room, of a phial of something pungent hidden in her handkerchief.
Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts and wonderments not allayed at that altar; and after her husband had joined her found further chagrin in his failure to throw himself into these speculations. They all had Isabel for subject; but Edmund Ludlow, as he had always done before, declined to be surprised, or distressed, or mystified, or elated, at anything his sister-in-law might have done or have failed to do. Mrs. Ludlow’s mental motions were sufficiently various. At one moment she thought it would be so natural for that young woman to come home and take a house in New York—the Rossiters’, for instance, which had an elegant conservatory and was just round the corner from her own; at another she couldn’t conceal her surprise at the girl’s not marrying some member of one of the great aristocracies. On the whole, as I have said, she had fallen from high communion with the probabilities. She had taken more satisfaction in Isabel’s accession of fortune than if the money had been left to herself; it had seemed to her to offer just the proper setting for her sister’s slightly meagre, but scarce the less eminent figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than Lily had thought likely—development, to Lily’s understanding, being somehow mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties. Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides; but she appeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which Mrs. Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily’s conception of such achievements was extremely vague; but this was exactly what she had expected of Isabel—to give it form and body. Isabel could have done as well as she had done in New York; and Mrs. Ludlow appealed to her husband to know whether there was any privilege she enjoyed in Europe which the society of that city might not offer her. We know ourselves that Isabel had made conquests—whether inferior or not to those she might have effected in her native land it would be a delicate matter to decide; and it is not altogether with a feeling of complacency that I again mention that she had not rendered these honourable victories public. She had not told her sister the history of Lord Warburton, nor had she given her a hint of Mr. Osmond’s state of mind; and she had had no better reason for her silence than that she didn’t wish to speak. It was more romantic to say nothing, and, drinking deep, in secret, of romance, she was as little disposed to ask poor Lily’s advice as she would have been to close that rare volume forever. But Lily knew nothing of these discriminations, and could only pronounce her sister’s career a strange anti-climax—an impression confirmed by the fact that Isabel’s silence about Mr. Osmond, for instance, was in direct proportion to the frequency with which he occupied her thoughts. As this happened very often it sometimes appeared to Mrs. Ludlow that she had lost her courage. So uncanny a result of so exhilarating an incident as inheriting a fortune was of course perplexing to the cheerful Lily; it added to her general sense that Isabel was not at all like other people.
Our young lady’s courage, however, might have been taken as reaching its height after her relations had gone home. She could imagine braver things than spending the winter in Paris—Paris had sides by which it so resembled New York, Paris was like smart, neat prose—and her close correspondence with Madame Merle did much to stimulate such flights. She had never had a keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness and wantonness of liberty, than when she turned away from the platform at the Euston Station on one of the last days of November, after the departure of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband and her children to their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for her to regale; she was very conscious of that; she was very observant, as we know, of what was good for her, and her effort was constantly to find something that was good enough. To profit by the present advantage till the latest moment she had made the journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers. She would have accompanied them to Liverpool as well, only Edmund Ludlow had asked her, as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety and she asked such impossible questions. Isabel watched the train move away; she kissed her hand to the elder of her small nephews, a demonstrative child who leaned dangerously far out of the window of the carriage and made separation an occasion of violent hilarity, and then she walked back into the foggy London street. The world lay before her—she could do whatever she chose. There was a deep thrill in it all, but for the present her choice was tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back from Euston Square to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoon had already closed in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air, looked weak and red; our heroine was unattended and Euston Square was a long way from Piccadilly. But Isabel performed the journey with a positive enjoyment of its dangers and lost her way almost on purpose, in order to get more sensations, so that she was disappointed when an obliging policeman easily set her right again. She was so fond of the spectacle of human life that she enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in the London streets—the moving crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops, the flaring stalls, the dark, shining dampness of everything. That evening, at her hotel, she wrote to Madame Merle that she should start in a day or two for Rome. She made her way down to Rome without touching at Florence—having gone first to Venice and then proceeded southward by Ancona. She accomplished this journey without other assistance than that of her servant, for her natural protectors were not now on the ground. Ralph Touchett was spending the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, in the September previous, had been recalled to America by a telegram from the Interviewer. This journal offered its brilliant correspondent a fresher field for her genius than the mouldering cities of Europe, and Henrietta was cheered on her way by a promise from Mr. Bantling that he would soon come over to see her. Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett to apologise for not presenting herself just yet in Florence, and her aunt replied characteristically enough. Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one “would” have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things. Her letter was frank, but (a rare case with Mrs. Touchett) not so frank as it pretended. She easily forgave her niece for not stopping at Florence, because she took it for a sign that Gilbert Osmond was less in question there than formerly. She watched of course to see if he would now find a pretext for going to Rome, and derived some comfort from learning that he had not been guilty of an absence. Isabel, on her side, had not been a fortnight in Rome before she proposed to Madame Merle that they should make a little pilgrimage to the East. Madame Merle remarked that her friend was restless, but she added that she herself had always been consumed with the desire to visit Athens and Constantinople. The two ladies accordingly embarked on this expedition, and spent three months in Greece, in Turkey, in Egypt. Isabel found much to interest her in these countries, though Madame Merle continued to remark that even among the most classic sites, the scenes most calculated to suggest repose and reflexion, a certain incoherence prevailed in her. Isabel travelled rapidly and recklessly; she was like a thirsty person draining cup after cup. Madame Merle meanwhile, as lady-in-waiting to a princess circulating incognita, panted a little in her rear. It was on Isabel’s invitation she had come, and she imparted all due dignity to the girl’s uncountenanced state. She played her part with the tact that might have been expected of her, effacing herself and accepting the position of a companion whose expenses were profusely paid. The situation, however, had no hardships, and people who met this reserved though striking pair on their travels would not have been able to tell you which was patroness and which client. To say that Madame Merle improved on acquaintance states meagrely the impression she made on her friend, who had found her from the first so ample and so easy. At the end of an intimacy of three months Isabel felt she knew her better; her character had revealed itself, and the admirable woman had also at last redeemed her promise of relating her history from her own point of view—a consummation the more desirable as Isabel had already heard it related from the point of view of others. This history was so sad a one (in so far as it concerned the late M. Merle, a positive adventurer, she might say, though originally so plausible, who had taken advantage, years before, of her youth and of an inexperience in which doubtless those who knew her only now would find it difficult to believe); it abounded so in startling and lamentable incidents that her companion wondered a person so eprouvée could have kept so much of her freshness, her interest in life. Into this freshness of Madame Merle’s she obtained a considerable insight; she seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical, carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or blanketed and bridled like the “favourite” of the jockey. She liked her as much as ever, but there was a corner of the curtain that never was lifted; it was as if she had remained after all something of a public performer, condemned to emerge only in character and in costume. She had once said that she came from a distance, that she belonged to the “old, old” world, and Isabel never lost the impression that she was the product of a different moral or social clime from her own, that she had grown up under other stars.
She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality. Of course the morality of civilised persons has always much in common; but our young woman had a sense in her of values gone wrong or, as they said at the shops, marked down. She considered, with the presumption of youth, that a morality differing from her own must be inferior to it; and this conviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an occasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a person who had raised delicate kindness to an art and whose pride was too high for the narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives might, in certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom in decadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had not even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain; and there were evidently things in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear. She had once or twice had a positive scare; since it so affected her to have to exclaim, of her friend, “Heaven forgive her, she doesn’t understand me!” Absurd as it may seem this discovery operated as a shock, left her with a vague dismay in which there was even an element of foreboding. The dismay of course subsided, in the light of some sudden proof of Madame Merle’s remarkable intelligence; but it stood for a high-water-mark in the ebb and flow of confidence. Madame Merle had once declared her belief that when a friendship ceases to grow it immediately begins to decline—there being no point of equilibrium between liking more and liking less. A stationary affection, in other words, was impossible—it must move one way or the other. However that might be, the girl had in these days a thousand uses for her sense of the romantic, which was more active than it had ever been. I do not allude to the impulse it received as she gazed at the Pyramids in the course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among the broken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her eyes upon the point designated to her as the Strait of Salamis; deep and memorable as these emotions had remained. She came back by the last of March from Egypt and Greece and made another stay in Rome. A few days after her arrival Gilbert Osmond descended from Florence and remained three weeks, during which the fact of her being with his old friend Madame Merle, in whose house she had gone to lodge, made it virtually inevitable that he should see her every day. When the last of April came she wrote to Mrs. Touchett that she should now rejoice to accept an invitation given long before, and went to pay a visit at Palazzo Crescentini, Madame Merle on this occasion remaining in Rome. She found her aunt alone; her cousin was still at Corfu. Ralph, however, was expected in Florence from day to day, and Isabel, who had not seen him for upwards of a year, was prepared to give him the most affectionate welcome.
It was not of him, nevertheless, that she was thinking while she stood at the window near which we found her a while ago, and it was not of any of the matters I have rapidly sketched. She was not turned to the past, but to the immediate, impending hour. She had reason to expect a scene, and she was not fond of scenes. She was not asking herself what she should say to her visitor; this question had already been answered. What he would say to her—that was the interesting issue. It could be nothing in the least soothing—she had warrant for this, and the conviction doubtless showed in the cloud on her brow. For the rest, however, all clearness reigned in her; she had put away her mourning and she walked in no small shimmering splendour. She only, felt older—ever so much, and as if she were “worth more” for it, like some curious piece in an antiquary’s collection. She was not at any rate left indefinitely to her apprehensions, for a servant at last stood before her with a card on his tray. “Let the gentleman come in,” she said, and continued to gaze out of the window after the footman had retired. It was only when she had heard the door close behind the person who presently entered that she looked round.
Caspar Goodwood stood there—stood and received a moment, from head to foot, the bright, dry gaze with which she rather withheld than offered a greeting. Whether his sense of maturity had kept pace with Isabel’s we shall perhaps presently ascertain; let me say meanwhile that to her critical glance he showed nothing of the injury of time. Straight, strong and hard, there was nothing in his appearance that spoke positively either of youth or of age; if he had neither innocence nor weakness, so he had no practical philosophy. His jaw showed the same voluntary cast as in earlier days; but a crisis like the present had in it of course something grim. He had the air of a man who had travelled hard; he said nothing at first, as if he had been out of breath. This gave Isabel time to make a reflexion: “Poor fellow, what great things he’s capable of, and what a pity he should waste so dreadfully his splendid force! What a pity too that one can’t satisfy everybody!” It gave her time to do more to say at the end of a minute: “I can’t tell you how I hoped you wouldn’t come!”
“I’ve no doubt of that.” And he looked about him for a seat. Not only had he come, but he meant to settle.
“You must be very tired,” said Isabel, seating herself, and generously, as she thought, to give him his opportunity.
“No, I’m not at all tired. Did you ever know me to be tired?”
“Never; I wish I had! When did you arrive?”
“Last night, very late; in a kind of snail-train they call the express. These Italian trains go at about the rate of an American funeral.”
“That’s in keeping—you must have felt as if you were coming to bury me!” And she forced a smile of encouragement to an easy view of their situation. She had reasoned the matter well out, making it perfectly clear that she broke no faith and falsified no contract; but for all this she was afraid of her visitor. She was ashamed of her fear; but she was devoutly thankful there was nothing else to be ashamed of. He looked at her with his stiff insistence, an insistence in which there was such a want of tact; especially when the dull dark beam in his eye rested on her as a physical weight.
“No, I didn’t feel that; I couldn’t think of you as dead. I wish I could!” he candidly declared.
“I thank you immensely.”
“I’d rather think of you as dead than as married to another man.”
“That’s very selfish of you!” she returned with the ardour of a real conviction. “If you’re not happy yourself others have yet a right to be.”
“Very likely it’s selfish; but I don’t in the least mind your saying so. I don’t mind anything you can say now—I don’t feel it. The cruellest things you could think of would be mere pin-pricks. After what you’ve done I shall never feel anything—I mean anything but that. That I shall feel all my life.”
Mr. Goodwood made these detached assertions with dry deliberateness, in his hard, slow American tone, which flung no atmospheric colour over propositions intrinsically crude. The tone made Isabel angry rather than touched her; but her anger perhaps was fortunate, inasmuch as it gave her a further reason for controlling herself. It was under the pressure of this control that she became, after a little, irrelevant. “When did you leave New York?”
He threw up his head as if calculating. “Seventeen days ago.”
“You must have travelled fast in spite of your slow trains.”
“I came as fast as I could. I’d have come five days ago if I had been able.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference, Mr. Goodwood,” she coldly smiled.
“Not to you—no. But to me.”
“You gain nothing that I see.”
“That’s for me to judge!”
“Of course. To me it seems that you only torment yourself.” And then, to change the subject, she asked him if he had seen Henrietta Stackpole. He looked as if he had not come from Boston to Florence to talk of Henrietta Stackpole; but he answered, distinctly enough, that this young lady had been with him just before he left America. “She came to see you?” Isabel then demanded.
“Yes, she was in Boston, and she called at my office. It was the day I had got your letter.”
“Did you tell her?” Isabel asked with a certain anxiety.
“Oh no,” said Caspar Goodwood simply; “I didn’t want to do that. She’ll hear it quick enough; she hears everything.”
“I shall write to her, and then she’ll write to me and scold me,” Isabel declared, trying to smile again.
Caspar, however, remained sternly grave. “I guess she’ll come right out,” he said.
“On purpose to scold me?”
“I don’t know. She seemed to think she had not seen Europe thoroughly.”
“I’m glad you tell me that,” Isabel said. “I must prepare for her.”
Mr. Goodwood fixed his eyes for a moment on the floor; then at last, raising them, “Does she know Mr. Osmond?” he enquired.
“A little. And she doesn’t like him. But of course I don’t marry to please Henrietta,” she added. It would have been better for poor Caspar if she had tried a little more to gratify Miss Stackpole; but he didn’t say so; he only asked, presently, when her marriage would take place. To which she made answer that she didn’t know yet. “I can only say it will be soon. I’ve told no one but yourself and one other person—an old friend of Mr. Osmond’s.”
“Is it a marriage your friends won’t like?” he demanded.
“I really haven’t an idea. As I say, I don’t marry for my friends.”
He went on, making no exclamation, no comment, only asking questions, doing it quite without delicacy. “Who and what then is Mr. Gilbert Osmond?”
“Who and what? Nobody and nothing but a very good and very honourable man. He’s not in business,” said Isabel. “He’s not rich; he’s not known for anything in particular.”
She disliked Mr. Goodwood’s questions, but she said to herself that she owed it to him to satisfy him as far as possible. The satisfaction poor Caspar exhibited was, however, small; he sat very upright, gazing at her. “Where does he come from? Where does he belong?”
She had never been so little pleased with the way he said “belawng.” “He comes from nowhere. He has spent most of his life in Italy.”
“You said in your letter he was American. Hasn’t he a native place?”
“Yes, but he has forgotten it. He left it as a small boy.”
“Has he never gone back?”
“Why should he go back?” Isabel asked, flushing all defensively. “He has no profession.”
“He might have gone back for his pleasure. Doesn’t he like the United States?”
“He doesn’t know them. Then he’s very quiet and very simple—he contents himself with Italy.”
“With Italy and with you,” said Mr. Goodwood with gloomy plainness and no appearance of trying to make an epigram. “What has he ever done?” he added abruptly.
“That I should marry him? Nothing at all,” Isabel replied while her patience helped itself by turning a little to hardness. “If he had done great things would you forgive me any better? Give me up, Mr. Goodwood; I’m marrying a perfect nonentity. Don’t try to take an interest in him. You can’t.”
“I can’t appreciate him; that’s what you mean. And you don’t mean in the least that he’s a perfect nonentity. You think he’s grand, you think he’s great, though no one else thinks so.”
Isabel’s colour deepened; she felt this really acute of her companion, and it was certainly a proof of the aid that passion might render perceptions she had never taken for fine. “Why do you always comeback to what others think? I can’t discuss Mr. Osmond with you.”
“Of course not,” said Caspar reasonably. And he sat there with his air of stiff helplessness, as if not only this were true, but there were nothing else that they might discuss.
“You see how little you gain,” she accordingly broke out—“how little comfort or satisfaction I can give you.”
“I didn’t expect you to give me much.”
“I don’t understand then why you came.”
“I came because I wanted to see you once more—even just as you are.”
“I appreciate that; but if you had waited a while, sooner or later we should have been sure to meet, and our meeting would have been pleasanter for each of us than this.”
“Waited till after you’re married? That’s just what I didn’t want to do. You’ll be different then.”
“Not very. I shall still be a great friend of yours. You’ll see.”
“That will make it all the worse,” said Mr. Goodwood grimly.
“Ah, you’re unaccommodating! I can’t promise to dislike you in order to help you to resign yourself.”
“I shouldn’t care if you did!”
Isabel got up with a movement of repressed impatience and walked to the window, where she remained a moment looking out. When she turned round her visitor was still motionless in his place. She came toward him again and stopped, resting her hand on the back of the chair she had just quitted. “Do you mean you came simply to look at me? That’s better for you perhaps than for me.”
“I wished to hear the sound of your voice,” he said.
“You’ve heard it, and you see it says nothing very sweet.”
“It gives me pleasure, all the same.” And with this he got up. She had felt pain and displeasure on receiving early that day the news he was in Florence and by her leave would come within an hour to see her. She had been vexed and distressed, though she had sent back word by his messenger that he might come when he would. She had not been better pleased when she saw him; his being there at all was so full of heavy implications. It implied things she could never assent to—rights, reproaches, remonstrance, rebuke, the expectation of making her change her purpose. These things, however, if implied, had not been expressed; and now our young lady, strangely enough, began to resent her visitor’s remarkable self-control. There was a dumb misery about him that irritated her; there was a manly staying of his hand that made her heart beat faster. She felt her agitation rising, and she said to herself that she was angry in the way a woman is angry when she has been in the wrong. She was not in the wrong; she had fortunately not that bitterness to swallow; but, all the same, she wished he would denounce her a little. She had wished his visit would be short; it had no purpose, no propriety; yet now that he seemed to be turning away she felt a sudden horror of his leaving her without uttering a word that would give her an opportunity to defend herself more than she had done in writing to him a month before, in a few carefully chosen words, to announce her engagement. If she were not in the wrong, however, why should she desire to defend herself? It was an excess of generosity on Isabel’s part to desire that Mr. Goodwood should be angry. And if he had not meanwhile held himself hard it might have made him so to hear the tone in which she suddenly exclaimed, as if she were accusing him of having accused her: “I’ve not deceived you! I was perfectly free!”
“Yes, I know that,” said Caspar.
“I gave you full warning that I’d do as I chose.”
“You said you’d probably never marry, and you said it with such a manner that I pretty well believed it.”
She considered this an instant. “No one can be more surprised than myself at my present intention.”
“You told me that if I heard you were engaged I was not to believe it,” Caspar went on. “I heard it twenty days ago from yourself, but I remembered what you had said. I thought there might be some mistake, and that’s partly why I came.”
“If you wish me to repeat it by word of mouth, that’s soon done. There’s no mistake whatever.”
“I saw that as soon as I came into the room.”
“What good would it do you that I shouldn’t marry?” she asked with a certain fierceness.
“I should like it better than this.”
“You’re very selfish, as I said before.”
“I know that. I’m selfish as iron.”
“Even iron sometimes melts! If you’ll be reasonable I’ll see you again.”
“Don’t you call me reasonable now?”
“I don’t know what to say to you,” she answered with sudden humility.
“I shan’t trouble you for a long time,” the young man went on. He made a step towards the door, but he stopped. “Another reason why I came was that I wanted to hear what you would say in explanation of your having changed your mind.”
Her humbleness as suddenly deserted her. “In explanation? Do you think I’m bound to explain?”
He gave her one of his long dumb looks. “You were very positive. I did believe it.”
“So did I. Do you think I could explain if I would?”
“No, I suppose not. Well,” he added, “I’ve done what I wished. I’ve seen you.”
“How little you make of these terrible journeys,” she felt the poverty of her presently replying.
“If you’re afraid I’m knocked up—in any such way as that—you may he at your ease about it.” He turned away, this time in earnest, and no hand-shake, no sign of parting, was exchanged between them.
At the door he stopped with his hand on the knob. “I shall leave Florence to-morrow,” he said without a quaver.
“I’m delighted to hear it!” she answered passionately. Five minutes after he had gone out she burst into tears.
Her fit of weeping, however, was soon smothered, and the signs of it had vanished when, an hour later, she broke the news to her aunt. I use this expression because she had been sure Mrs. Touchett would not be pleased; Isabel had only waited to tell her till she had seen Mr. Goodwood. She had an odd impression that it would not be honourable to make the fact public before she should have heard what Mr. Goodwood would say about it. He had said rather less than she expected, and she now had a somewhat angry sense of having lost time. But she would lose no more; she waited till Mrs. Touchett came into the drawing-room before the mid-day breakfast, and then she began. “Aunt Lydia, I’ve something to tell you.”
Mrs. Touchett gave a little jump and looked at her almost fiercely. “You needn’t tell me; I know what it is.”
“I don’t know how you know.”
“The same way that I know when the window’s open—by feeling a draught. You’re going to marry that man.”
“What man do you mean?” Isabel enquired with great dignity.
“Madame Merle’s friend—Mr. Osmond.”
“I don’t know why you call him Madame Merle’s friend. Is that the principal thing he’s known by?”
“If he’s not her friend he ought to be—after what she has done for him!” cried Mrs. Touchett. “I shouldn’t have expected it of her; I’m disappointed.”
“If you mean that Madame Merle has had anything to do with my engagement you’re greatly mistaken,” Isabel declared with a sort of ardent coldness.
“You mean that your attractions were sufficient, without the gentleman’s having had to be lashed up? You’re quite right. They’re immense, your attractions, and he would never have presumed to think of you if she hadn’t put him up to it. He has a very good opinion of himself, but he was not a man to take trouble. Madame Merle took the trouble for him.”
“He has taken a great deal for himself!” cried Isabel with a voluntary laugh.
Mrs. Touchett gave a sharp nod. “I think he must, after all, to have made you like him so much.”
“I thought he even pleased you.”
“He did, at one time; and that’s why I’m angry with him.”
“Be angry with me, not with him,” said the girl.
“Oh, I’m always angry with you; that’s no satisfaction! Was it for this that you refused Lord Warburton?”
“Please don’t go back to that. Why shouldn’t I like Mr. Osmond, since others have done so?”
“Others, at their wildest moments, never wanted to marry him. There’s nothing of him,” Mrs. Touchett explained.
“Then he can’t hurt me,” said Isabel.
“Do you think you’re going to be happy? No one’s happy, in such doings, you should know.”
“I shall set the fashion then. What does one marry for?”
“What you will marry for, heaven only knows. People usually marry as they go into partnership—to set up a house. But in your partnership you’ll bring everything.”
“Is it that Mr. Osmond isn’t rich? Is that what you’re talking about?” Isabel asked.
“He has no money; he has no name; he has no importance. I value such things and I have the courage to say it; I think they’re very precious. Many other people think the same, and they show it. But they give some other reason.”
Isabel hesitated a little. “I think I value everything that’s valuable. I care very much for money, and that’s why I wish Mr. Osmond to have a little.”
“Give it to him then; but marry some one else.”
“His name’s good enough for me,” the girl went on. “It’s a very pretty name. Have I such a fine one myself?”
“All the more reason you should improve on it. There are only a dozen American names. Do you marry him out of charity?”
“It was my duty to tell you, Aunt Lydia, but I don’t think it’s my duty to explain to you. Even if it were I shouldn’t be able. So please don’t remonstrate; in talking about it you have me at a disadvantage. I can’t talk about it.”
“I don’t remonstrate, I simply answer you: I must give some sign of intelligence. I saw it coming, and I said nothing. I never meddle.”
“You never do, and I’m greatly obliged to you. You’ve been very considerate.”
“It was not considerate—it was convenient,” said Mrs. Touchett. “But I shall talk to Madame Merle.”
“I don’t see why you keep bringing her in. She has been a very good friend to me.”
“Possibly; but she has been a poor one to me.”
“What has she done to you?”
“She has deceived me. She had as good as promised me to prevent your engagement.”
“She couldn’t have prevented it.”
“She can do anything; that’s what I’ve always liked her for. I knew she could play any part; but I understood that she played them one by one. I didn’t understand that she would play two at the same time.”
“I don’t know what part she may have played to you,” Isabel said; “that’s between yourselves. To me she has been honest and kind and devoted.”
“Devoted, of course; she wished you to marry her candidate. She told me she was watching you only in order to interpose.”
“She said that to please you,” the girl answered; conscious, however, of the inadequacy of the explanation.
“To please me by deceiving me? She knows me better. Am I pleased to-day?”
“I don’t think you’re ever much pleased,” Isabel was obliged to reply. “If Madame Merle knew you would learn the truth what had she to gain by insincerity?”
“She gained time, as you see. While I waited for her to interfere you were marching away, and she was really beating the drum.”
“That’s very well. But by your own admission you saw I was marching, and even if she had given the alarm you wouldn’t have tried to stop me.”
“No, but some one else would.”
“Whom do you mean?” Isabel asked, looking very hard at her aunt. Mrs. Touchett’s little bright eyes, active as they usually were, sustained her gaze rather than returned it. “Would you have listened to Ralph?”
“Not if he had abused Mr. Osmond.”
“Ralph doesn’t abuse people; you know that perfectly. He cares very much for you.”
“I know he does,” said Isabel; “and I shall feel the value of it now, for he knows that whatever I do I do with reason.”
“He never believed you would do this. I told him you were capable of it, and he argued the other way.”
“He did it for the sake of argument,” the girl smiled. “You don’t accuse him of having deceived you; why should you accuse Madame Merle?”
“He never pretended he’d prevent it.”
“I’m glad of that!” cried Isabel gaily. “I wish very much,” she presently added, “that when he comes you’d tell him first of my engagement.”
“Of course I’ll mention it,” said Mrs. Touchett. “I shall say nothing more to you about it, but I give you notice I shall talk to others.”
“That’s as you please. I only meant that it’s rather better the announcement should come from you than from me.”
“I quite agree with you; it’s much more proper!” And on this the aunt and the niece went to breakfast, where Mrs. Touchett, as good as her word, made no allusion to Gilbert Osmond. After an interval of silence, however, she asked her companion from whom she had received a visit an hour before.
“From an old friend—an American gentleman,” Isabel said with a colour in her cheek.
“An American gentleman of course. It’s only an American gentleman who calls at ten o’clock in the morning.”
“It was half-past ten; he was in a great hurry; he goes away this evening.”
“Couldn’t he have come yesterday, at the usual time?”
“He only arrived last night.”
“He spends but twenty-four hours in Florence?” Mrs. Touchett cried. “He’s an American gentleman truly.”
“He is indeed,” said Isabel, thinking with perverse admiration of what Caspar Goodwood had done for her.
Two days afterward Ralph arrived; but though Isabel was sure that Mrs. Touchett had lost no time in imparting to him the great fact, he showed at first no open knowledge of it. Their prompted talk was naturally of his health; Isabel had many questions to ask about Corfu. She had been shocked by his appearance when he came into the room; she had forgotten how ill he looked. In spite of Corfu he looked very ill to-day, and she wondered if he were really worse or if she were simply disaccustomed to living with an invalid. Poor Ralph made no nearer approach to conventional beauty as he advanced in life, and the now apparently complete loss of his health had done little to mitigate the natural oddity of his person. Blighted and battered, but still responsive and still ironic, his face was like a lighted lantern patched with paper and unsteadily held; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek; the exorbitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply. Lean he was altogether, lean and long and loose-jointed; an accidental cohesion of relaxed angles. His brown velvet jacket had become perennial; his hands had fixed themselves in his pockets; he shambled and stumbled and shuffled in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness. It was perhaps this whimsical gait that helped to mark his character more than ever as that of the humorous invalid—the invalid for whom even his own disabilities are part of the general joke. They might well indeed with Ralph have been the chief cause of the want of seriousness marking his view of a world in which the reason for his own continued presence was past finding out. Isabel had grown fond of his ugliness; his awkwardness had become dear to her. They had been sweetened by association; they struck her as the very terms on which it had been given him to be charming. He was so charming that her sense of his being ill had hitherto had a sort of comfort in it; the state of his health had seemed not a limitation, but a kind of intellectual advantage; it absolved him from all professional and official emotions and left him the luxury of being exclusively personal. The personality so resulting was delightful; he had remained proof against the staleness of disease; he had had to consent to be deplorably ill, yet had somehow escaped being formally sick. Such had been the girl’s impression of her cousin; and when she had pitied him it was only on reflection. As she reflected a good deal she had allowed him a certain amount of compassion; but she always had a dread of wasting that essence—a precious article, worth more to the giver than to any one else. Now, however, it took no great sensibility to feel that poor Ralph’s tenure of life was less elastic than it should be. He was a bright, free, generous spirit, he had all the illumination of wisdom and none of its pedantry, and yet he was distressfully dying.
Isabel noted afresh that life was certainly hard for some people, and she felt a delicate glow of shame as she thought how easy it now promised to become for herself. She was prepared to learn that Ralph was not pleased with her engagement; but she was not prepared, in spite of her affection for him, to let this fact spoil the situation. She was not even prepared, or so she thought, to resent his want of sympathy; for it would be his privilege—it would be indeed his natural line—to find fault with any step she might take toward marriage. One’s cousin always pretended to hate one’s husband; that was traditional, classical; it was a part of one’s cousin’s always pretending to adore one. Ralph was nothing if not critical; and though she would certainly, other things being equal, have been as glad to marry to please him as to please any one, it would be absurd to regard as important that her choice should square with his views. What were his views after all? He had pretended to believe she had better have married Lord Warburton; but this was only because she had refused that excellent man. If she had accepted him Ralph would certainly have taken another tone; he always took the opposite. You could criticise any marriage; it was the essence of a marriage to be open to criticism. How well she herself, should she only give her mind to it, might criticise this union of her own! She had other employment, however, and Ralph was welcome to relieve her of the care. Isabel was prepared to be most patient and most indulgent. He must have seen that, and this made it the more odd he should say nothing. After three days had elapsed without his speaking our young woman wearied of waiting; dislike it as he would, he might at least go through the form. We, who know more about poor Ralph than his cousin, may easily believe that during the hours that followed his arrival at Palazzo Crescentini he had privately gone through many forms. His mother had literally greeted him with the great news, which had been even more sensibly chilling than Mrs. Touchett’s maternal kiss. Ralph was shocked and humiliated; his calculations had been false and the person in the world in whom he was most interested was lost. He drifted about the house like a rudderless vessel in a rocky stream, or sat in the garden of the palace on a great cane chair, his long legs extended, his head thrown back and his hat pulled over his eyes. He felt cold about the heart; he had never liked anything less. What could he do, what could he say? If the girl were irreclaimable could he pretend to like it? To attempt to reclaim her was permissible only if the attempt should succeed. To try to persuade her of anything sordid or sinister in the man to whose deep art she had succumbed would be decently discreet only in the event of her being persuaded. Otherwise he should simply have damned himself. It cost him an equal effort to speak his thought and to dissemble; he could neither assent with sincerity nor protest with hope. Meanwhile he knew—or rather he supposed—that the affianced pair were daily renewing their mutual vows. Osmond at this moment showed himself little at Palazzo Crescentini; but Isabel met him every day elsewhere, as she was free to do after their engagement had been made public. She had taken a carriage by the month, so as not to be indebted to her aunt for the means of pursuing a course of which Mrs. Touchett disapproved, and she drove in the morning to the Cascine. This suburban wilderness, during the early hours, was void of all intruders, and our young lady, joined by her lover in its quietest part, strolled with him a while through the grey Italian shade and listened to the nightingales.