One morning, on her return from her drive, some half-hour before luncheon, she quitted her vehicle in the court of the palace and, instead of ascending the great staircase, crossed the court, passed beneath another archway and entered the garden. A sweeter spot at this moment could not have been imagined. The stillness of noontide hung over it, and the warm shade, enclosed and still, made bowers like spacious caves. Ralph was sitting there in the clear gloom, at the base of a statue of Terpsichore—a dancing nymph with taper fingers and inflated draperies in the manner of Bernini; the extreme relaxation of his attitude suggested at first to Isabel that he was asleep. Her light footstep on the grass had not roused him, and before turning away she stood for a moment looking at him. During this instant he opened his eyes; upon which she sat down on a rustic chair that matched with his own. Though in her irritation she had accused him of indifference she was not blind to the fact that he had visibly had something to brood over. But she had explained his air of absence partly by the languor of his increased weakness, partly by worries connected with the property inherited from his father—the fruit of eccentric arrangements of which Mrs. Touchett disapproved and which, as she had told Isabel, now encountered opposition from the other partners in the bank. He ought to have gone to England, his mother said, instead of coming to Florence; he had not been there for months, and took no more interest in the bank than in the state of Patagonia.
“I’m sorry I waked you,” Isabel said; “you look too tired.”
“I feel too tired. But I was not asleep. I was thinking of you.”
“Are you tired of that?”
“Very much so. It leads to nothing. The road’s long and I never arrive.”
“What do you wish to arrive at?” she put to him, closing her parasol.
“At the point of expressing to myself properly what I think of your engagement.”
“Don’t think too much of it,” she lightly returned.
“Do you mean that it’s none of my business?”
“Beyond a certain point, yes.”
“That’s the point I want to fix. I had an idea you may have found me wanting in good manners. I’ve never congratulated you.”
“Of course I’ve noticed that. I wondered why you were silent.”
“There have been a good many reasons. I’ll tell you now,” Ralph said. He pulled off his hat and laid it on the ground; then he sat looking at her. He leaned back under the protection of Bernini, his head against his marble pedestal, his arms dropped on either side of him, his hands laid upon the rests of his wide chair. He looked awkward, uncomfortable; he hesitated long. Isabel said nothing; when people were embarrassed she was usually sorry for them, but she was determined not to help Ralph to utter a word that should not be to the honour of her high decision. “I think I’ve hardly got over my surprise,” he went on at last. “You were the last person I expected to see caught.”
“I don’t know why you call it caught.”
“Because you’re going to be put into a cage.”
“If I like my cage, that needn’t trouble you,” she answered.
“That’s what I wonder at; that’s what I’ve been thinking of.”
“If you’ve been thinking you may imagine how I’ve thought! I’m satisfied that I’m doing well.”
“You must have changed immensely. A year ago you valued your liberty beyond everything. You wanted only to see life.”
“I’ve seen it,” said Isabel. “It doesn’t look to me now, I admit, such an inviting expanse.”
“I don’t pretend it is; only I had an idea that you took a genial view of it and wanted to survey the whole field.”
“I’ve seen that one can’t do anything so general. One must choose a corner and cultivate that.”
“That’s what I think. And one must choose as good a corner as possible. I had no idea, all winter, while I read your delightful letters, that you were choosing. You said nothing about it, and your silence put me off my guard.”
“It was not a matter I was likely to write to you about. Besides, I knew nothing of the future. It has all come lately. If you had been on your guard, however,” Isabel asked, “what would you have done?”
“I should have said ‘Wait a little longer.’”
“Wait for what?”
“Well, for a little more light,” said Ralph with rather an absurd smile, while his hands found their way into his pockets.
“Where should my light have come from? From you?”
“I might have struck a spark or two.”
Isabel had drawn off her gloves; she smoothed them out as they lay upon her knee. The mildness of this movement was accidental, for her expression was not conciliatory. “You’re beating about the bush, Ralph. You wish to say you don’t like Mr. Osmond, and yet you’re afraid.”
“Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike? I’m willing to wound him, yes—but not to wound you. I’m afraid of you, not of him. If you marry him it won’t be a fortunate way for me to have spoken.”
“If I marry him! Have you had any expectation of dissuading me?”
“Of course that seems to you too fatuous.”
“No,” said Isabel after a little; “it seems to me too touching.”
“That’s the same thing. It makes me so ridiculous that you pity me.”
She stroked out her long gloves again. “I know you’ve a great affection for me. I can’t get rid of that.”
“For heaven’s sake don’t try. Keep that well in sight. It will convince you how intensely I want you to do well.”
“And how little you trust me!”
There was a moment’s silence; the warm noontide seemed to listen. “I trust you, but I don’t trust him,” said Ralph.
She raised her eyes and gave him a wide, deep look. “You’ve said it now, and I’m glad you’ve made it so clear. But you’ll suffer by it.”
“Not if you’re just.”
“I’m very just,” said Isabel. “What better proof of it can there be than that I’m not angry with you? I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I’m not. I was when you began, but it has passed away. Perhaps I ought to be angry, but Mr. Osmond wouldn’t think so. He wants me to know everything; that’s what I like him for. You’ve nothing to gain, I know that. I’ve never been so nice to you, as a girl, that you should have much reason for wishing me to remain one. You give very good advice; you’ve often done so. No, I’m very quiet; I’ve always believed in your wisdom,” she went on, boasting of her quietness, yet speaking with a kind of contained exaltation. It was her passionate desire to be just; it touched Ralph to the heart, affected him like a caress from a creature he had injured. He wished to interrupt, to reassure her; for a moment he was absurdly inconsistent; he would have retracted what he had said. But she gave him no chance; she went on, having caught a glimpse, as she thought, of the heroic line and desiring to advance in that direction. “I see you’ve some special idea; I should like very much to hear it. I’m sure it’s disinterested; I feel that. It seems a strange thing to argue about, and of course I ought to tell you definitely that if you expect to dissuade me you may give it up. You’ll not move me an inch; it’s too late. As you say, I’m caught. Certainly it won’t be pleasant for you to remember this, but your pain will be in your own thoughts. I shall never reproach you.”
“I don’t think you ever will,” said Ralph. “It’s not in the least the sort of marriage I thought you’d make.”
“What sort of marriage was that, pray?”
“Well, I can hardly say. I hadn’t exactly a positive view of it, but I had a negative. I didn’t think you’d decide for—well, for that type.”
“What’s the matter with Mr. Osmond’s type, if it be one? His being so independent, so individual, is what I most see in him,” the girl declared. “What do you know against him? You know him scarcely at all.”
“Yes,” Ralph said, “I know him very little, and I confess I haven’t facts and items to prove him a villain. But all the same I can’t help feeling that you’re running a grave risk.”
“Marriage is always a grave risk, and his risk’s as grave as mine.”
“That’s his affair! If he’s afraid, let him back out. I wish to God he would.”
Isabel reclined in her chair, folding her arms and gazing a while at her cousin. “I don’t think I understand you,” she said at last coldly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I believed you’d marry a man of more importance.”
Cold, I say, her tone had been, but at this a colour like a flame leaped into her face. “Of more importance to whom? It seems to me enough that one’s husband should be of importance to one’s self!”
Ralph blushed as well; his attitude embarrassed him. Physically speaking he proceeded to change it; he straightened himself, then leaned forward, resting a hand on each knee. He fixed his eyes on the ground; he had an air of the most respectful deliberation.
“I’ll tell you in a moment what I mean,” he presently said. He felt agitated, intensely eager; now that he had opened the discussion he wished to discharge his mind. But he wished also to be superlatively gentle.
Isabel waited a little—then she went on with majesty. “In everything that makes one care for people Mr. Osmond is pre-eminent. There may be nobler natures, but I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting one. Mr. Osmond’s is the finest I know; he’s good enough for me, and interesting enough, and clever enough. I’m far more struck with what he has and what he represents than with what he may lack.”
“I had treated myself to a charming vision of your future,” Ralph observed without answering this; “I had amused myself with planning out a high destiny for you. There was to be nothing of this sort in it. You were not to come down so easily or so soon.”
“Come down, you say?”
“Well, that renders my sense of what has happened to you. You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue—to be, sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud—a missile that should never have reached you—and straight you drop to the ground. It hurts me,” said Ralph audaciously, “hurts me as if I had fallen myself!”
The look of pain and bewilderment deepened in his companion’s face. “I don’t understand you in the least,” she repeated. “You say you amused yourself with a project for my career—I don’t understand that. Don’t amuse yourself too much, or I shall think you’re doing it at my expense.”
Ralph shook his head. “I’m not afraid of your not believing that I’ve had great ideas for you.”
“What do you mean by my soaring and sailing?” she pursued.
“I’ve never moved on a higher plane than I’m moving on now. There’s nothing higher for a girl than to marry a—a person she likes,” said poor Isabel, wandering into the didactic.
“It’s your liking the person we speak of that I venture to criticise, my dear cousin. I should have said that the man for you would have been a more active, larger, freer sort of nature.” Ralph hesitated, then added: “I can’t get over the sense that Osmond is somehow—well, small.” He had uttered the last word with no great assurance; he was afraid she would flash out again. But to his surprise she was quiet; she had the air of considering.
“Small?” She made it sound immense.
“I think he’s narrow, selfish. He takes himself so seriously!”
“He has a great respect for himself; I don’t blame him for that,” said Isabel. “It makes one more sure to respect others.”
Ralph for a moment felt almost reassured by her reasonable tone.
“Yes, but everything is relative; one ought to feel one’s relation to things—to others. I don’t think Mr. Osmond does that.”
“I’ve chiefly to do with his relation to me. In that he’s excellent.”
“He’s the incarnation of taste,” Ralph went on, thinking hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond’s sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely. He wished to describe him impersonally, scientifically. “He judges and measures, approves and condemns, altogether by that.”
“It’s a happy thing then that his taste should be exquisite.”
“It’s exquisite, indeed, since it has led him to select you as his bride. But have you ever seen such a taste—a really exquisite one—ruffled?”
“I hope it may never be my fortune to fail to gratify my husband’s.”
At these words a sudden passion leaped to Ralph’s lips. “Ah, that’s wilful, that’s unworthy of you! You were not meant to be measured in that way—you were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!”
Isabel rose quickly and he did the same, so that they stood for a moment looking at each other as if he had flung down a defiance or an insult. But “You go too far,” she simply breathed.
“I’ve said what I had on my mind—and I’ve said it because I love you!”
Isabel turned pale: was he too on that tiresome list? She had a sudden wish to strike him off. “Ah then, you’re not disinterested!”
“I love you, but I love without hope,” said Ralph quickly, forcing a smile and feeling that in that last declaration he had expressed more than he intended.
Isabel moved away and stood looking into the sunny stillness of the garden; but after a little she turned back to him. “I’m afraid your talk then is the wildness of despair! I don’t understand it—but it doesn’t matter. I’m not arguing with you; it’s impossible I should; I’ve only tried to listen to you. I’m much obliged to you for attempting to explain,” she said gently, as if the anger with which she had just sprung up had already subsided. “It’s very good of you to try to warn me, if you’re really alarmed; but I won’t promise to think of what you’ve said: I shall forget it as soon as possible. Try and forget it yourself; you’ve done your duty, and no man can do more. I can’t explain to you what I feel, what I believe, and I wouldn’t if I could.” She paused a moment and then went on with an inconsequence that Ralph observed even in the midst of his eagerness to discover some symptom of concession. “I can’t enter into your idea of Mr. Osmond; I can’t do it justice, because I see him in quite another way. He’s not important—no, he’s not important; he’s a man to whom importance is supremely indifferent. If that’s what you mean when you call him ‘small,’ then he’s as small as you please. I call that large—it’s the largest thing I know. I won’t pretend to argue with you about a person I’m going to marry,” Isabel repeated. “I’m not in the least concerned to defend Mr. Osmond; he’s not so weak as to need my defence. I should think it would seem strange even to yourself that I should talk of him so quietly and coldly, as if he were any one else. I wouldn’t talk of him at all to any one but you; and you, after what you’ve said—I may just answer you once for all. Pray, would you wish me to make a mercenary marriage—what they call a marriage of ambition? I’ve only one ambition—to be free to follow out a good feeling. I had others once, but they’ve passed away. Do you complain of Mr. Osmond because he’s not rich? That’s just what I like him for. I’ve fortunately money enough; I’ve never felt so thankful for it as to-day. There have been moments when I should like to go and kneel down by your father’s grave: he did perhaps a better thing than he knew when he put it into my power to marry a poor man—a man who has borne his poverty with such dignity, with such indifference. Mr. Osmond has never scrambled nor struggled—he has cared for no worldly prize. If that’s to be narrow, if that’s to be selfish, then it’s very well. I’m not frightened by such words, I’m not even displeased; I’m only sorry that you should make a mistake. Others might have done so, but I’m surprised that you should. You might know a gentleman when you see one—you might know a fine mind. Mr. Osmond makes no mistakes! He knows everything, he understands everything, he has the kindest, gentlest, highest spirit. You’ve got hold of some false idea. It’s a pity, but I can’t help it; it regards you more than me.” Isabel paused a moment, looking at her cousin with an eye illumined by a sentiment which contradicted the careful calmness of her manner—a mingled sentiment, to which the angry pain excited by his words and the wounded pride of having needed to justify a choice of which she felt only the nobleness and purity, equally contributed. Though she paused Ralph said nothing; he saw she had more to say. She was grand, but she was highly solicitous; she was indifferent, but she was all in a passion. “What sort of a person should you have liked me to marry?” she asked suddenly. “You talk about one’s soaring and sailing, but if one marries at all one touches the earth. One has human feelings and needs, one has a heart in one’s bosom, and one must marry a particular individual. Your mother has never forgiven me for not having come to a better understanding with Lord Warburton, and she’s horrified at my contenting myself with a person who has none of his great advantages—no property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort. It’s the total absence of all these things that pleases me. Mr. Osmond’s simply a very lonely, a very cultivated and a very honest man—he’s not a prodigious proprietor.”
Ralph had listened with great attention, as if everything she said merited deep consideration; but in truth he was only half thinking of the things she said, he was for the rest simply accommodating himself to the weight of his total impression—the impression of her ardent good faith. She was wrong, but she believed; she was deluded, but she was dismally consistent. It was wonderfully characteristic of her that, having invented a fine theory, about Gilbert Osmond, she loved him not for what he really possessed, but for his very poverties dressed out as honours. Ralph remembered what he had said to his father about wishing to put it into her power to meet the requirements of her imagination. He had done so, and the girl had taken full advantage of the luxury. Poor Ralph felt sick; he felt ashamed. Isabel had uttered her last words with a low solemnity of conviction which virtually terminated the discussion, and she closed it formally by turning away and walking back to the house. Ralph walked beside her, and they passed into the court together and reached the big staircase. Here he stopped and Isabel paused, turning on him a face of elation—absolutely and perversely of gratitude. His opposition had made her own conception of her conduct clearer to her. “Shall you not come up to breakfast?” she asked.
“No; I want no breakfast; I’m not hungry.”
“You ought to eat,” said the girl; “you live on air.”
“I do, very much, and I shall go back into the garden and take another mouthful. I came thus far simply to say this. I told you last year that if you were to get into trouble I should feel terribly sold. That’s how I feel to-day.”
“Do you think I’m in trouble?”
“One’s in trouble when one’s in error.”
“Very well,” said Isabel; “I shall never complain of my trouble to you!” And she moved up the staircase.
Ralph, standing there with his hands in his pockets, followed her with his eyes; then the lurking chill of the high-walled court struck him and made him shiver, so that he returned to the garden to breakfast on the Florentine sunshine.
Isabel, when she strolled in the Cascine with her lover, felt no impulse to tell him how little he was approved at Palazzo Crescentini. The discreet opposition offered to her marriage by her aunt and her cousin made on the whole no great impression upon her; the moral of it was simply that they disliked Gilbert Osmond. This dislike was not alarming to Isabel; she scarcely even regretted it; for it served mainly to throw into higher relief the fact, in every way so honourable, that she married to please herself. One did other things to please other people; one did this for a more personal satisfaction; and Isabel’s satisfaction was confirmed by her lover’s admirable good conduct. Gilbert Osmond was in love, and he had never deserved less than during these still, bright days, each of them numbered, which preceded the fulfilment of his hopes, the harsh criticism passed upon him by Ralph Touchett. The chief impression produced on Isabel’s spirit by this criticism was that the passion of love separated its victim terribly from every one but the loved object. She felt herself disjoined from every one she had ever known before—from her two sisters, who wrote to express a dutiful hope that she would be happy, and a surprise, somewhat more vague, at her not having chosen a consort who was the hero of a richer accumulation of anecdote; from Henrietta, who, she was sure, would come out, too late, on purpose to remonstrate; from Lord Warburton, who would certainly console himself, and from Caspar Goodwood, who perhaps would not; from her aunt, who had cold, shallow ideas about marriage, for which she was not sorry to display her contempt; and from Ralph, whose talk about having great views for her was surely but a whimsical cover for a personal disappointment. Ralph apparently wished her not to marry at all—that was what it really meant—because he was amused with the spectacle of her adventures as a single woman. His disappointment made him say angry things about the man she had preferred even to him: Isabel flattered herself that she believed Ralph had been angry. It was the more easy for her to believe this because, as I say, she had now little free or unemployed emotion for minor needs, and accepted as an incident, in fact quite as an ornament, of her lot the idea that to prefer Gilbert Osmond as she preferred him was perforce to break all other ties. She tasted of the sweets of this preference, and they made her conscious, almost with awe, of the invidious and remorseless tide of the charmed and possessed condition, great as was the traditional honour and imputed virtue of being in love. It was the tragic part of happiness; one’s right was always made of the wrong of some one else.
The elation of success, which surely now flamed high in Osmond, emitted meanwhile very little smoke for so brilliant a blaze. Contentment, on his part, took no vulgar form; excitement, in the most self-conscious of men, was a kind of ecstasy of self-control. This disposition, however, made him an admirable lover; it gave him a constant view of the smitten and dedicated state. He never forgot himself, as I say; and so he never forgot to be graceful and tender, to wear the appearance—which presented indeed no difficulty—of stirred senses and deep intentions. He was immensely pleased with his young lady; Madame Merle had made him a present of incalculable value. What could be a finer thing to live with than a high spirit attuned to softness? For would not the softness be all for one’s self, and the strenuousness for society, which admired the air of superiority? What could be a happier gift in a companion than a quick, fanciful mind which saved one repetitions and reflected one’s thought on a polished, elegant surface? Osmond hated to see his thought reproduced literally—that made it look stale and stupid; he preferred it to be freshened in the reproduction even as “words” by music. His egotism had never taken the crude form of desiring a dull wife; this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one—a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that talk might become for him a sort of served dessert. He found the silver quality in this perfection in Isabel; he could tap her imagination with his knuckle and make it ring. He knew perfectly, though he had not been told, that their union enjoyed little favour with the girl’s relations; but he had always treated her so completely as an independent person that it hardly seemed necessary to express regret for the attitude of her family. Nevertheless, one morning, he made an abrupt allusion to it. “It’s the difference in our fortune they don’t like,” he said. “They think I’m in love with your money.”
“Are you speaking of my aunt—of my cousin?” Isabel asked. “How do you know what they think?”
“You’ve not told me they’re pleased, and when I wrote to Mrs. Touchett the other day she never answered my note. If they had been delighted I should have had some sign of it, and the fact of my being poor and you rich is the most obvious explanation of their reserve. But of course when a poor man marries a rich girl he must be prepared for imputations. I don’t mind them; I only care for one thing—for your not having the shadow of a doubt. I don’t care what people of whom I ask nothing think—I’m not even capable perhaps of wanting to know. I’ve never so concerned myself, God forgive me, and why should I begin to-day, when I have taken to myself a compensation for everything? I won’t pretend I’m sorry you’re rich; I’m delighted. I delight in everything that’s yours—whether it be money or virtue. Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet. It seems to me, however, that I’ve sufficiently proved the limits of my itch for it: I never in my life tried to earn a penny, and I ought to be less subject to suspicion than most of the people one sees grubbing and grabbing. I suppose it’s their business to suspect—that of your family; it’s proper on the whole they should. They’ll like me better some day; so will you, for that matter. Meanwhile my business is not to make myself bad blood, but simply to be thankful for life and love.” “It has made me better, loving you,” he said on another occasion; “it has made me wiser and easier and—I won’t pretend to deny—brighter and nicer and even stronger. I used to want a great many things before and to be angry I didn’t have them. Theoretically I was satisfied, as I once told you. I flattered myself I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid, sterile, hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I’m really satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see it’s a delightful story. My dear girl, I can’t tell you how life seems to stretch there before us—what a long summer afternoon awaits us. It’s the latter half of an Italian day—with a golden haze, and the shadows just lengthening, and that divine delicacy in the light, the air, the landscape, which I have loved all my life and which you love to-day. Upon my honour, I don’t see why we shouldn’t get on. We’ve got what we like—to say nothing of having each other. We’ve the faculty of admiration and several capital convictions. We’re not stupid, we’re not mean, we’re not under bonds to any kind of ignorance or dreariness. You’re remarkably fresh, and I’m remarkably well-seasoned. We’ve my poor child to amuse us; we’ll try and make up some little life for her. It’s all soft and mellow—it has the Italian colouring.”
They made a good many plans, but they left themselves also a good deal of latitude; it was a matter of course, however, that they should live for the present in Italy. It was in Italy that they had met, Italy had been a party to their first impressions of each other, and Italy should be a party to their happiness. Osmond had the attachment of old acquaintance and Isabel the stimulus of new, which seemed to assure her a future at a high level of consciousness of the beautiful. The desire for unlimited expansion had been succeeded in her soul by the sense that life was vacant without some private duty that might gather one’s energies to a point. She had told Ralph she had “seen life” in a year or two and that she was already tired, not of the act of living, but of that of observing. What had become of all her ardours, her aspirations, her theories, her high estimate of her independence and her incipient conviction that she should never marry? These things had been absorbed in a more primitive need—a need the answer to which brushed away numberless questions, yet gratified infinite desires. It simplified the situation at a stroke, it came down from above like the light of the stars, and it needed no explanation. There was explanation enough in the fact that he was her lover, her own, and that she should be able to be of use to him. She could surrender to him with a kind of humility, she could marry him with a kind of pride; she was not only taking, she was giving.
He brought Pansy with him two or three times to the Cascine—Pansy who was very little taller than a year before, and not much older. That she would always be a child was the conviction expressed by her father, who held her by the hand when she was in her sixteenth year and told her to go and play while he sat down a little with the pretty lady. Pansy wore a short dress and a long coat; her hat always seemed too big for her. She found pleasure in walking off, with quick, short steps, to the end of the alley, and then in walking back with a smile that seemed an appeal for approbation. Isabel approved in abundance, and the abundance had the personal touch that the child’s affectionate nature craved. She watched her indications as if for herself also much depended on them—Pansy already so represented part of the service she could render, part of the responsibility she could face. Her father took so the childish view of her that he had not yet explained to her the new relation in which he stood to the elegant Miss Archer. “She doesn’t know,” he said to Isabel; “she doesn’t guess; she thinks it perfectly natural that you and I should come and walk here together simply as good friends. There seems to me something enchantingly innocent in that; it’s the way I like her to be. No, I’m not a failure, as I used to think; I’ve succeeded in two things. I’m to marry the woman I adore, and I’ve brought up my child, as I wished, in the old way.”
He was very fond, in all things, of the “old way”; that had struck Isabel as one of his fine, quiet, sincere notes. “It occurs to me that you’ll not know whether you’ve succeeded until you’ve told her,” she said. “You must see how she takes your news, She may be horrified—she may be jealous.”
“I’m not afraid of that; she’s too fond of you on her own account. I should like to leave her in the dark a little longer—to see if it will come into her head that if we’re not engaged we ought to be.”
Isabel was impressed by Osmond’s artistic, the plastic view, as it somehow appeared, of Pansy’s innocence—her own appreciation of it being more anxiously moral. She was perhaps not the less pleased when he told her a few days later that he had communicated the fact to his daughter, who had made such a pretty little speech—“Oh, then I shall have a beautiful sister!” She was neither surprised nor alarmed; she had not cried, as he expected.
“Perhaps she had guessed it,” said Isabel.
“Don’t say that; I should be disgusted if I believed that. I thought it would be just a little shock; but the way she took it proves that her good manners are paramount. That’s also what I wished. You shall see for yourself; to-morrow she shall make you her congratulations in person.”
The meeting, on the morrow, took place at the Countess Gemini’s, whither Pansy had been conducted by her father, who knew that Isabel was to come in the afternoon to return a visit made her by the Countess on learning that they were to become sisters-in-law. Calling at Casa Touchett the visitor had not found Isabel at home; but after our young woman had been ushered into the Countess’s drawing-room Pansy arrived to say that her aunt would presently appear. Pansy was spending the day with that lady, who thought her of an age to begin to learn how to carry herself in company. It was Isabel’s view that the little girl might have given lessons in deportment to her relative, and nothing could have justified this conviction more than the manner in which Pansy acquitted herself while they waited together for the Countess. Her father’s decision, the year before, had finally been to send her back to the convent to receive the last graces, and Madame Catherine had evidently carried out her theory that Pansy was to be fitted for the great world.
“Papa has told me that you’ve kindly consented to marry him,” said this excellent woman’s pupil. “It’s very delightful; I think you’ll suit very well.”
“You think I shall suit you?”
“You’ll suit me beautifully; but what I mean is that you and papa will suit each other. You’re both so quiet and so serious. You’re not so quiet as he—or even as Madame Merle; but you’re more quiet than many others. He should not for instance have a wife like my aunt. She’s always in motion, in agitation—to-day especially; you’ll see when she comes in. They told us at the convent it was wrong to judge our elders, but I suppose there’s no harm if we judge them favourably. You’ll be a delightful companion for papa.”
“For you too, I hope,” Isabel said.
“I speak first of him on purpose. I’ve told you already what I myself think of you; I liked you from the first. I admire you so much that I think it will be a good fortune to have you always before me. You’ll be my model; I shall try to imitate you though I’m afraid it will be very feeble. I’m very glad for papa—he needed something more than me. Without you I don’t see how he could have got it. You’ll be my stepmother, but we mustn’t use that word. They’re always said to be cruel; but I don’t think you’ll ever so much as pinch or even push me. I’m not afraid at all.”
“My good little Pansy,” said Isabel gently, “I shall be ever so kind to you.” A vague, inconsequent vision of her coming in some odd way to need it had intervened with the effect of a chill.
“Very well then, I’ve nothing to fear,” the child returned with her note of prepared promptitude. What teaching she had had, it seemed to suggest—or what penalties for non-performance she dreaded!
Her description of her aunt had not been incorrect; the Countess Gemini was further than ever from having folded her wings. She entered the room with a flutter through the air and kissed Isabel first on the forehead and then on each cheek as if according to some ancient prescribed rite. She drew the visitor to a sofa and, looking at her with a variety of turns of the head, began to talk very much as if, seated brush in hand before an easel, she were applying a series of considered touches to a composition of figures already sketched in. “If you expect me to congratulate you I must beg you to excuse me. I don’t suppose you care if I do or not; I believe you’re supposed not to care—through being so clever—for all sorts of ordinary things. But I care myself if I tell fibs; I never tell them unless there’s something rather good to be gained. I don’t see what’s to be gained with you—especially as you wouldn’t believe me. I don’t make professions any more than I make paper flowers or flouncey lampshades—I don’t know how. My lampshades would be sure to take fire, my roses and my fibs to be larger than life. I’m very glad for my own sake that you’re to marry Osmond; but I won’t pretend I’m glad for yours. You’re very brilliant—you know that’s the way you’re always spoken of; you’re an heiress and very good-looking and original, not banal; so it’s a good thing to have you in the family. Our family’s very good, you know; Osmond will have told you that; and my mother was rather distinguished—she was called the American Corinne. But we’re dreadfully fallen, I think, and perhaps you’ll pick us up. I’ve great confidence in you; there are ever so many things I want to talk to you about. I never congratulate any girl on marrying; I think they ought to make it somehow not quite so awful a steel trap. I suppose Pansy oughtn’t to hear all this; but that’s what she has come to me for—to acquire the tone of society. There’s no harm in her knowing what horrors she may be in for. When first I got an idea that my brother had designs on you I thought of writing to you, to recommend you, in the strongest terms, not to listen to him. Then I thought it would be disloyal, and I hate anything of that kind. Besides, as I say, I was enchanted for myself; and after all I’m very selfish. By the way, you won’t respect me, not one little mite, and we shall never be intimate. I should like it, but you won’t. Some day, all the same, we shall be better friends than you will believe at first. My husband will come and see you, though, as you probably know, he’s on no sort of terms with Osmond. He’s very fond of going to see pretty women, but I’m not afraid of you. In the first place I don’t care what he does. In the second, you won’t care a straw for him; he won’t be a bit, at any time, your affair, and, stupid as he is, he’ll see you’re not his. Some day, if you can stand it, I’ll tell you all about him. Do you think my niece ought to go out of the room? Pansy, go and practise a little in my boudoir.”
“Let her stay, please,” said Isabel. “I would rather hear nothing that Pansy may not!”
One afternoon of the autumn of 1876, toward dusk, a young man of pleasing appearance rang at the door of a small apartment on the third floor of an old Roman house. On its being opened he enquired for Madame Merle; whereupon the servant, a neat, plain woman, with a French face and a lady’s maid’s manner, ushered him into a diminutive drawing-room and requested the favour of his name. “Mr. Edward Rosier,” said the young man, who sat down to wait till his hostess should appear.
The reader will perhaps not have forgotten that Mr. Rosier was an ornament of the American circle in Paris, but it may also be remembered that he sometimes vanished from its horizon. He had spent a portion of several winters at Pau, and as he was a gentleman of constituted habits he might have continued for years to pay his annual visit to this charming resort. In the summer of 1876, however, an incident befell him which changed the current not only of his thoughts, but of his customary sequences. He passed a month in the Upper Engadine and encountered at Saint Moritz a charming young girl. To this little person he began to pay, on the spot, particular attention: she struck him as exactly the household angel he had long been looking for. He was never precipitate, he was nothing if not discreet, so he forbore for the present to declare his passion; but it seemed to him when they parted—the young lady to go down into Italy and her admirer to proceed to Geneva, where he was under bonds to join other friends—that he should be romantically wretched if he were not to see her again. The simplest way to do so was to go in the autumn to Rome, where Miss Osmond was domiciled with her family. Mr. Rosier started on his pilgrimage to the Italian capital and reached it on the first of November. It was a pleasant thing to do, but for the young man there was a strain of the heroic in the enterprise. He might expose himself, unseasoned, to the poison of the Roman air, which in November lay, notoriously, much in wait. Fortune, however, favours the brave; and this adventurer, who took three grains of quinine a day, had at the end of a month no cause to deplore his temerity. He had made to a certain extent good use of his time; he had devoted it in vain to finding a flaw in Pansy Osmond’s composition. She was admirably finished; she had had the last touch; she was really a consummate piece. He thought of her in amorous meditation a good deal as he might have thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess. Miss Osmond, indeed, in the bloom of her juvenility, had a hint of the rococo which Rosier, whose taste was predominantly for that manner, could not fail to appreciate. That he esteemed the productions of comparatively frivolous periods would have been apparent from the attention he bestowed upon Madame Merle’s drawing-room, which, although furnished with specimens of every style, was especially rich in articles of the last two centuries. He had immediately put a glass into one eye and looked round; and then “By Jove, she has some jolly good things!” he had yearningly murmured. The room was small and densely filled with furniture; it gave an impression of faded silk and little statuettes which might totter if one moved. Rosier got up and wandered about with his careful tread, bending over the tables charged with knick-knacks and the cushions embossed with princely arms. When Madame Merle came in she found him standing before the fireplace with his nose very close to the great lace flounce attached to the damask cover of the mantel. He had lifted it delicately, as if he were smelling it.
“It’s old Venetian,” she said; “it’s rather good.”
“It’s too good for this; you ought to wear it.”
“They tell me you have some better in Paris, in the same situation.”
“Ah, but I can’t wear mine,” smiled the visitor.
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t! I’ve better lace than that to wear.”
His eyes wandered, lingeringly, round the room again. “You’ve some very good things.”
“Yes, but I hate them.”
“Do you want to get rid of them?” the young man quickly asked.
“No, it’s good to have something to hate: one works it off!”
“I love my things,” said Mr. Rosier as he sat there flushed with all his recognitions. “But it’s not about them, nor about yours, that I came to talk to you.” He paused a moment and then, with greater softness: “I care more for Miss Osmond than for all the bibelots in Europe!”
Madame Merle opened wide eyes. “Did you come to tell me that?”
“I came to ask your advice.”
She looked at him with a friendly frown, stroking her chin with her large white hand. “A man in love, you know, doesn’t ask advice.”
“Why not, if he’s in a difficult position? That’s often the case with a man in love. I’ve been in love before, and I know. But never so much as this time—really never so much. I should like particularly to know what you think of my prospects. I’m afraid that for Mr. Osmond I’m not—well, a real collector’s piece.”
“Do you wish me to intercede?” Madame Merle asked with her fine arms folded and her handsome mouth drawn up to the left.
“If you could say a good word for me I should be greatly obliged. There will be no use in my troubling Miss Osmond unless I have good reason to believe her father will consent.”
“You’re very considerate; that’s in your favour. But you assume in rather an off-hand way that I think you a prize.”
“You’ve been very kind to me,” said the young man. “That’s why I came.”
“I’m always kind to people who have good Louis Quatorze. It’s very rare now, and there’s no telling what one may get by it.” With which the left-hand corner of Madame Merle’s mouth gave expression to the joke.
But he looked, in spite of it, literally apprehensive and consistently strenuous. “Ah, I thought you liked me for myself!”
“I like you very much; but, if you please, we won’t analyse. Pardon me if I seem patronising, but I think you a perfect little gentleman. I must tell you, however, that I’ve not the marrying of Pansy Osmond.”
“I didn’t suppose that. But you’ve seemed to me intimate with her family, and I thought you might have influence.”
Madame Merle considered. “Whom do you call her family?”
“Why, her father; and—how do you say it in English?—her belle-mere.”
“Mr. Osmond’s her father, certainly; but his wife can scarcely be termed a member of her family. Mrs. Osmond has nothing to do with marrying her.”
“I’m sorry for that,” said Rosier with an amiable sigh of good faith. “I think Mrs. Osmond would favour me.”
“Very likely—if her husband doesn’t.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Does she take the opposite line from him?”
“In everything. They think quite differently.”
“Well,” said Rosier, “I’m sorry for that; but it’s none of my business. She’s very fond of Pansy.”
“Yes, she’s very fond of Pansy.”
“And Pansy has a great affection for her. She has told me how she loves her as if she were her own mother.”
“You must, after all, have had some very intimate talk with the poor child,” said Madame Merle. “Have you declared your sentiments?”
“Never!” cried Rosier, lifting his neatly-gloved hand. “Never till I’ve assured myself of those of the parents.”
“You always wait for that? You’ve excellent principles; you observe the proprieties.”
“I think you’re laughing at me,” the young man murmured, dropping back in his chair and feeling his small moustache. “I didn’t expect that of you, Madame Merle.”
She shook her head calmly, like a person who saw things as she saw them. “You don’t do me justice. I think your conduct in excellent taste and the best you could adopt. Yes, that’s what I think.”
“I wouldn’t agitate her—only to agitate her; I love her too much for that,” said Ned Rosier.
“I’m glad, after all, that you’ve told me,” Madame Merle went on. “Leave it to me a little; I think I can help you.”
“I said you were the person to come to!” her visitor cried with prompt elation.
“You were very clever,” Madame Merle returned more dryly. “When I say I can help you I mean once assuming your cause to be good. Let us think a little if it is.”
“I’m awfully decent, you know,” said Rosier earnestly. “I won’t say I’ve no faults, but I’ll say I’ve no vices.”
“All that’s negative, and it always depends, also, on what people call vices. What’s the positive side? What’s the virtuous? What have you got besides your Spanish lace and your Dresden teacups?”
“I’ve a comfortable little fortune—about forty thousand francs a year. With the talent I have for arranging, we can live beautifully on such an income.”
“Beautifully, no. Sufficiently, yes. Even that depends on where you live.”
“Well, in Paris. I would undertake it in Paris.”
Madame Merle’s mouth rose to the left. “It wouldn’t be famous; you’d have to make use of the teacups, and they’d get broken.”
“We don’t want to be famous. If Miss Osmond should have everything pretty it would be enough. When one’s as pretty as she one can afford—well, quite cheap faience. She ought never to wear anything but muslin—without the sprig,” said Rosier reflectively.
“Wouldn’t you even allow her the sprig? She’d be much obliged to you at any rate for that theory.”
“It’s the correct one, I assure you; and I’m sure she’d enter into it. She understands all that; that’s why I love her.”
“She’s a very good little girl, and most tidy—also extremely graceful. But her father, to the best of my belief, can give her nothing.”
Rosier scarce demurred. “I don’t in the least desire that he should. But I may remark, all the same, that he lives like a rich man.”
“The money’s his wife’s; she brought him a large fortune.”
“Mrs. Osmond then is very fond of her stepdaughter; she may do something.”
“For a love-sick swain you have your eyes about you!” Madame Merle exclaimed with a laugh.
“I esteem a dot very much. I can do without it, but I esteem it.”
“Mrs. Osmond,” Madame Merle went on, “will probably prefer to keep her money for her own children.”
“Her own children? Surely she has none.”
“She may have yet. She had a poor little boy, who died two years ago, six months after his birth. Others therefore may come.”
“I hope they will, if it will make her happy. She’s a splendid woman.”
Madame Merle failed to burst into speech. “Ah, about her there’s much to be said. Splendid as you like! We’ve not exactly made out that you’re a parti. The absence of vices is hardly a source of income.
“Pardon me, I think it may be,” said Rosier quite lucidly.
“You’ll be a touching couple, living on your innocence!”
“I think you underrate me.”
“You’re not so innocent as that? Seriously,” said Madame Merle, “of course forty thousand francs a year and a nice character are a combination to be considered. I don’t say it’s to be jumped at, but there might be a worse offer. Mr. Osmond, however, will probably incline to believe he can do better.”
“He can do so perhaps; but what can his daughter do? She can’t do better than marry the man she loves. For she does, you know,” Rosier added eagerly.
“She does—I know it.”
“Ah,” cried the young man, “I said you were the person to come to.”
“But I don’t know how you know it, if you haven’t asked her,” Madame Merle went on.
“In such a case there’s no need of asking and telling; as you say, we’re an innocent couple. How did you know it?”
“I who am not innocent? By being very crafty. Leave it to me; I’ll find out for you.”
Rosier got up and stood smoothing his hat. “You say that rather coldly. Don’t simply find out how it is, but try to make it as it should be.”
“I’ll do my best. I’ll try to make the most of your advantages.”
“Thank you so very much. Meanwhile then I’ll say a word to Mrs. Osmond.”
“Gardez-vous-en bien!” And Madame Merle was on her feet. “Don’t set her going, or you’ll spoil everything.”
Rosier gazed into his hat; he wondered whether his hostess had been after all the right person to come to. “I don’t think I understand you. I’m an old friend of Mrs. Osmond, and I think she would like me to succeed.”
“Be an old friend as much as you like; the more old friends she has the better, for she doesn’t get on very well with some of her new. But don’t for the present try to make her take up the cudgels for you. Her husband may have other views, and, as a person who wishes her well, I advise you not to multiply points of difference between them.”
Poor Rosier’s face assumed an expression of alarm; a suit for the hand of Pansy Osmond was even a more complicated business than his taste for proper transitions had allowed. But the extreme good sense which he concealed under a surface suggesting that of a careful owner’s “best set” came to his assistance. “I don’t see that I’m bound to consider Mr. Osmond so very much!” he exclaimed. “No, but you should consider her. You say you’re an old friend. Would you make her suffer?”
“Not for the world.”
“Then be very careful, and let the matter alone till I’ve taken a few soundings.”
“Let the matter alone, dear Madame Merle? Remember that I’m in love.”
“Oh, you won’t burn up! Why did you come to me, if you’re not to heed what I say?”
“You’re very kind; I’ll be very good,” the young man promised. “But I’m afraid Mr. Osmond’s pretty hard,” he added in his mild voice as he went to the door.
Madame Merle gave a short laugh. “It has been said before. But his wife isn’t easy either.”
“Ah, she’s a splendid woman!” Ned Rosier repeated, for departure. He resolved that his conduct should be worthy of an aspirant who was already a model of discretion; but he saw nothing in any pledge he had given Madame Merle that made it improper he should keep himself in spirits by an occasional visit to Miss Osmond’s home. He reflected constantly on what his adviser had said to him, and turned over in his mind the impression of her rather circumspect tone. He had gone to her de confiance, as they put it in Paris; but it was possible he had been precipitate. He found difficulty in thinking of himself as rash—he had incurred this reproach so rarely; but it certainly was true that he had known Madame Merle only for the last month, and that his thinking her a delightful woman was not, when one came to look into it, a reason for assuming that she would be eager to push Pansy Osmond into his arms, gracefully arranged as these members might be to receive her. She had indeed shown him benevolence, and she was a person of consideration among the girl’s people, where she had a rather striking appearance (Rosier had more than once wondered how she managed it) of being intimate without being familiar. But possibly he had exaggerated these advantages. There was no particular reason why she should take trouble for him; a charming woman was charming to every one, and Rosier felt rather a fool when he thought of his having appealed to her on the ground that she had distinguished him. Very likely—though she had appeared to say it in joke—she was really only thinking of his bibelots. Had it come into her head that he might offer her two or three of the gems of his collection? If she would only help him to marry Miss Osmond he would present her with his whole museum. He could hardly say so to her outright; it would seem too gross a bribe. But he should like her to believe it.
It was with these thoughts that he went again to Mrs. Osmond’s, Mrs. Osmond having an “evening”—she had taken the Thursday of each week—when his presence could be accounted for on general principles of civility. The object of Mr. Rosier’s well-regulated affection dwelt in a high house in the very heart of Rome; a dark and massive structure overlooking a sunny piazzetta in the neighbourhood of the Farnese Palace. In a palace, too, little Pansy lived—a palace by Roman measure, but a dungeon to poor Rosier’s apprehensive mind. It seemed to him of evil omen that the young lady he wished to marry, and whose fastidious father he doubted of his ability to conciliate, should be immured in a kind of domestic fortress, a pile which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in “Murray” and visited by tourists who looked, on a vague survey, disappointed and depressed, and which had frescoes by Caravaggio in the piano nobile and a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns in the wide, nobly-arched loggia overhanging the damp court where a fountain gushed out of a mossy niche. In a less preoccupied frame of mind he could have done justice to the Palazzo Roccanera; he could have entered into the sentiment of Mrs. Osmond, who had once told him that on settling themselves in Rome she and her husband had chosen this habitation for the love of local colour. It had local colour enough, and though he knew less about architecture than about Limoges enamels he could see that the proportions of the windows and even the details of the cornice had quite the grand air. But Rosier was haunted by the conviction that at picturesque periods young girls had been shut up there to keep them from their true loves, and then, under the threat of being thrown into convents, had been forced into unholy marriages. There was one point, however, to which he always did justice when once he found himself in Mrs. Osmond’s warm, rich-looking reception-rooms, which were on the second floor. He acknowledged that these people were very strong in “good things.” It was a taste of Osmond’s own—not at all of hers; this she had told him the first time he came to the house, when, after asking himself for a quarter of an hour whether they had even better “French” than he in Paris, he was obliged on the spot to admit that they had, very much, and vanquished his envy, as a gentleman should, to the point of expressing to his hostess his pure admiration of her treasures. He learned from Mrs. Osmond that her husband had made a large collection before their marriage and that, though he had annexed a number of fine pieces within the last three years, he had achieved his greatest finds at a time when he had not the advantage of her advice. Rosier interpreted this information according to principles of his own. For “advice” read “cash,” he said to himself; and the fact that Gilbert Osmond had landed his highest prizes during his impecunious season confirmed his most cherished doctrine—the doctrine that a collector may freely be poor if he be only patient. In general, when Rosier presented himself on a Thursday evening, his first recognition was for the walls of the saloon; there were three or four objects his eyes really yearned for. But after his talk with Madame Merle he felt the extreme seriousness of his position; and now, when he came in, he looked about for the daughter of the house with such eagerness as might be permitted a gentleman whose smile, as he crossed a threshold, always took everything comfortable for granted.