The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 2

“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.

CHAPTER XXXV

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.”