________________________________________________
_ It will probably not surprise the reflective reader that Ralph
Touchett should have seen less of his cousin since her marriage
than he had done before that event--an event of which he took
such a view as could hardly prove a confirmation of intimacy. He
had uttered his thought, as we know, and after this had held his
peace, Isabel not having invited him to resume a discussion which
marked an era in their relations. That discussion had made a
difference--the difference he feared rather than the one he
hoped. It had not chilled the girl's zeal in carrying out her
engagement, but it had come dangerously near to spoiling a
friendship. No reference was ever again made between them to
Ralph's opinion of Gilbert Osmond, and by surrounding this topic
with a sacred silence they managed to preserve a semblance of
reciprocal frankness. But there was a difference, as Ralph often
said to himself--there was a difference. She had not forgiven
him, she never would forgive him: that was all he had gained. She
thought she had forgiven him; she believed she didn't care; and
as she was both very generous and very proud these convictions
represented a certain reality. But whether or no the event should
justify him he would virtually have done her a wrong, and the
wrong was of the sort that women remember best. As Osmond's wife
she could never again be his friend. If in this character she
should enjoy the felicity she expected, she would have nothing
but contempt for the man who had attempted, in advance, to
undermine a blessing so dear; and if on the other hand his
warning should be justified the vow she had taken that he should
never know it would lay upon her spirit such a burden as to make
her hate him. So dismal had been, during the year that followed
his cousin's marriage, Ralph's prevision of the future; and if
his meditations appear morbid we must remember he was not in the
bloom of health. He consoled himself as he might by behaving (as
he deemed) beautifully, and was present at the ceremony by which
Isabel was united to Mr. Osmond, and which was performed in
Florence in the month of June. He learned from his mother that
Isabel at first had thought of celebrating her nuptials in her
native land, but that as simplicity was what she chiefly desired
to secure she had finally decided, in spite of Osmond's professed
willingness to make a journey of any length, that this
characteristic would be best embodied in their being married by
the nearest clergyman in the shortest time. The thing was done
therefore at the little American chapel, on a very hot day, in
the presence only of Mrs. Touchett and her son, of Pansy Osmond
and the Countess Gemini. That severity in the proceedings of
which I just spoke was in part the result of the absence of two
persons who might have been looked for on the occasion and who
would have lent it a certain richness. Madame Merle had been
invited, but Madame Merle, who was unable to leave Rome, had
written a gracious letter of excuses. Henrietta Stackpole had not
been invited, as her departure from America, announced to Isabel
by Mr. Goodwood, was in fact frustrated by the duties of her
profession; but she had sent a letter, less gracious than Madame
Merle's, intimating that, had she been able to cross the
Atlantic, she would have been present not only as a witness but
as a critic. Her return to Europe had taken place somewhat later,
and she had effected a meeting with Isabel in the autumn, in
Paris, when she had indulged--perhaps a trifle too freely--her
critical genius. Poor Osmond, who was chiefly the subject of it,
had protested so sharply that Henrietta was obliged to declare to
Isabel that she had taken a step which put a barrier between
them. "It isn't in the least that you've married--it is that you
have married HIM," she had deemed it her duty to remark;
agreeing, it will be seen, much more with Ralph Touchett than she
suspected, though she had few of his hesitations and
compunctions. Henrietta's second visit to Europe, however, was
not apparently to have been made in vain; for just at the moment
when Osmond had declared to Isabel that he really must object to
that newspaper-woman, and Isabel had answered that it seemed to
her he took Henrietta too hard, the good Mr. Bantling had
appeared upon the scene and proposed that they should take a run
down to Spain. Henrietta's letters from Spain had proved the most
acceptable she had yet published, and there had been one in
especial, dated from the Alhambra and entitled 'Moors and
Moonlight,' which generally passed for her masterpiece. Isabel
had been secretly disappointed at her husband's not seeing his
way simply to take the poor girl for funny. She even wondered if
his sense of fun, or of the funny--which would be his sense of
humour, wouldn't it?--were by chance defective. Of course she
herself looked at the matter as a person whose present happiness
had nothing to grudge to Henrietta's violated conscience. Osmond
had thought their alliance a kind of monstrosity; he couldn't
imagine what they had in common. For him, Mr. Bantling's fellow
tourist was simply the most vulgar of women, and he had also
pronounced her the most abandoned. Against this latter clause
of the verdict Isabel had appealed with an ardour that had made
him wonder afresh at the oddity of some of his wife's tastes.
Isabel could explain it only by saying that she liked to know
people who were as different as possible from herself. "Why then
don't you make the acquaintance of your washerwoman?" Osmond had
enquired; to which Isabel had answered that she was afraid her
washerwoman wouldn't care for her. Now Henrietta cared so much.
Ralph had seen nothing of her for the greater part of the two
years that had followed her marriage; the winter that formed the
beginning of her residence in Rome he had spent again at San
Remo, where he had been joined in the spring by his mother, who
afterwards had gone with him to England, to see what they were
doing at the bank--an operation she couldn't induce him to
perform. Ralph had taken a lease of his house at San Remo, a
small villa which he had occupied still another winter; but late
in the month of April of this second year he had come down to
Rome. It was the first time since her marriage that he had stood
face to face with Isabel; his desire to see her again was then of
the keenest. She had written to him from time to time, but her
letters told him nothing he wanted to know. He had asked his
mother what she was making of her life, and his mother had simply
answered that she supposed she was making the best of it. Mrs.
Touchett had not the imagination that communes with the unseen,
and she now pretended to no intimacy with her niece, whom she
rarely encountered. This young woman appeared to be living in a
sufficiently honourable way, but Mrs. Touchett still remained of
the opinion that her marriage had been a shabby affair. It had
given her no pleasure to think of Isabel's establishment, which
she was sure was a very lame business. From time to time, in
Florence, she rubbed against the Countess Gemini, doing her best
always to minimise the contact; and the Countess reminded her of
Osmond, who made her think of Isabel. The Countess was less
talked of in these days; but Mrs. Touchett augured no good of
that: it only proved how she had been talked of before. There was
a more direct suggestion of Isabel in the person of Madame Merle;
but Madame Merle's relations with Mrs. Touchett had undergone a
perceptible change. Isabel's aunt had told her, without
circumlocution, that she had played too ingenious a part; and
Madame Merle, who never quarrelled with any one, who appeared to
think no one worth it, and who had performed the miracle of
living, more or less, for several years with Mrs. Touchett and
showing no symptom of irritation--Madame Merle now took a very
high tone and declared that this was an accusation from which she
couldn't stoop to defend herself. She added, however (without
stooping), that her behaviour had been only too simple, that she
had believed only what she saw, that she saw Isabel was not eager
to marry and Osmond not eager to please (his repeated visits had
been nothing; he was boring himself to death on his hill-top and
he came merely for amusement). Isabel had kept her sentiments to
herself, and her journey to Greece and Egypt had effectually
thrown dust in her companion's eyes. Madame Merle accepted the
event--she was unprepared to think of it as a scandal; but that
she had played any part in it, double or single, was an
imputation against which she proudly protested. It was doubtless
in consequence of Mrs. Touchett's attitude, and of the injury it
offered to habits consecrated by many charming seasons, that
Madame Merle had, after this, chosen to pass many months in
England, where her credit was quite unimpaired. Mrs. Touchett had
done her a wrong; there are some things that can't be forgiven.
But Madame Merle suffered in silence; there was always something
exquisite in her dignity.
Ralph, as I say, had wished to see for himself; but while engaged
in this pursuit he had yet felt afresh what a fool he had been to
put the girl on her guard. He had played the wrong card, and now
he had lost the game. He should see nothing, he should learn
nothing; for him she would always wear a mask. His true line
would have been to profess delight in her union, so that later,
when, as Ralph phrased it, the bottom should fall out of it, she
might have the pleasure of saying to him that he had been a
goose. He would gladly have consented to pass for a goose in
order to know Isabel's real situation. At present, however, she
neither taunted him with his fallacies nor pretended that her own
confidence was justified; if she wore a mask it completely
covered her face. There was something fixed and mechanical in the
serenity painted on it; this was not an expression, Ralph said--
it was a representation, it was even an advertisement. She had
lost her child; that was a sorrow, but it was a sorrow she
scarcely spoke of; there was more to say about it than she could
say to Ralph. It belonged to the past, moreover; it had occurred
six months before and she had already laid aside the tokens of
mourning. She appeared to be leading the life of the world; Ralph
heard her spoken of as having a "charming position." He observed
that she produced the impression of being peculiarly enviable,
that it was supposed, among many people, to be a privilege even
to know her. Her house was not open to every one, and she had an
evening in the week to which people were not invited as a matter
of course. She lived with a certain magnificence, but you needed
to be a member of her circle to perceive it; for there was
nothing to gape at, nothing to criticise, nothing even to admire,
in the daily proceedings of Mr. and Mrs. Osmond. Ralph, in all
this, recognised the hand of the master; for he knew that Isabel
had no faculty for producing studied impressions. She struck him
as having a great love of movement, of gaiety, of late hours, of
long rides, of fatigue; an eagerness to be entertained, to be
interested, even to be bored, to make acquaintances, to see
people who were talked about, to explore the neighbourhood of
Rome, to enter into relation with certain of the mustiest relics
of its old society. In all this there was much less discrimination
than in that desire for comprehensiveness of development on which
he had been used to exercise his wit. There was a kind of
violence in some of her impulses, of crudity in some of her
experiments, which took him by surprise: it seemed to him that
she even spoke faster, moved faster, breathed faster, than before
her marriage. Certainly she had fallen into exaggerations--she
who used to care so much for the pure truth; and whereas of old
she had a great delight in good-humoured argument, in
intellectual play (she never looked so charming as when in the
genial heat of discussion she received a crushing blow full in
the face and brushed it away as a feather), she appeared now to
think there was nothing worth people's either differing about or
agreeing upon. Of old she had been curious, and now she was
indifferent, and yet in spite of her indifference her activity
was greater than ever. Slender still, but lovelier than before,
she had gained no great maturity of aspect; yet there was an
amplitude and a brilliancy in her personal arrangements that gave
a touch of insolence to her beauty. Poor human-hearted Isabel,
what perversity had bitten her? Her light step drew a mass of
drapery behind it; her intelligent head sustained a majesty of
ornament. The free, keen girl had become quite another person;
what he saw was the fine lady who was supposed to represent
something. What did Isabel represent? Ralph asked himself; and he
could only answer by saying that she represented Gilbert Osmond.
"Good heavens, what a function!" he then woefully exclaimed. He
was lost in wonder at the mystery of things.
He recognised Osmond, as I say; he recognised him at every turn.
He saw how he kept all things within limits; how he adjusted,
regulated, animated their manner of life. Osmond was in his
element; at last he had material to work with. He always had an
eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were
produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the
art was great. To surround his interior with a sort of invidious
sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense of exclusion, to make
people believe his house was different from every other, to
impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold
originality--this was the ingenious effort of the personage to
whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality. "He works with
superior material," Ralph said to himself; "it's rich abundance
compared with his former resources." Ralph was a clever man; but
Ralph had never--to his own sense--been so clever as when he
observed, in petto, that under the guise of caring only for
intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from
being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble
servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of
success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and
the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything
he did was pose--pose so subtly considered that if one were not
on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a
man who lived so much in the land of consideration. His tastes,
his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a
purpose. His life on his hill-top at Florence had been the
conscious attitude of years. His solitude, his ennui, his love
for his daughter, his good manners, his bad manners, were so many
features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model
of impertinence and mystification. His ambition was not to please
the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's
curiosity and then declining to satisfy it. It had made him feel
great, ever, to play the world a trick. The thing he had done in
his life most directly to please himself was his marrying Miss
Archer; though in this case indeed the gullible world was in a
manner embodied in poor Isabel, who had been mystified to the top
of her bent. Ralph of course found a fitness in being consistent;
he had embraced a creed, and as he had suffered for it he could
not in honour forsake it. I give this little sketch of its
articles for what they may at the time have been worth. It was
certain that he was very skilful in fitting the facts to his
theory--even the fact that during the month he spent in Rome at
this period the husband of the woman he loved appeared to regard
him not in the least as an enemy.
For Gilbert Osmond Ralph had not now that importance. It was not
that he had the importance of a friend; it was rather that he had
none at all. He was Isabel's cousin and he was rather unpleasantly
ill--it was on this basis that Osmond treated with him. He made
the proper enquiries, asked about his health, about Mrs.
Touchett, about his opinion of winter climates, whether he were
comfortable at his hotel. He addressed him, on the few occasions
of their meeting, not a word that was not necessary; but his
manner had always the urbanity proper to conscious success in the
presence of conscious failure. For all this, Ralph had had,
toward the end, a sharp inward vision of Osmond's making it of
small ease to his wife that she should continue to receive
Mr. Touchett. He was not jealous--he had not that excuse; no one
could be jealous of Ralph. But he made Isabel pay for her
old-time kindness, of which so much was still left; and as Ralph
had no idea of her paying too much, so when his suspicion had
become sharp, he had taken himself off. In doing so he had
deprived Isabel of a very interesting occupation: she had been
constantly wondering what fine principle was keeping him alive.
She had decided that it was his love of conversation; his
conversation had been better than ever. He had given up walking;
be was no longer a humorous stroller. He sat all day in a chair
--almost any chair would serve, and was so dependent on what you
would do for him that, had not his talk been highly
contemplative, you might have thought he was blind. The reader
already knows more about him than Isabel was ever to know, and
the reader may therefore be given the key to the mystery. What
kept Ralph alive was simply the fact that he had not yet seen
enough of the person in the world in whom he was most interested:
he was not yet satisfied. There was more to come; he couldn't
make up his mind to lose that. He wanted to see what she would
make of her husband--or what her husband would make of her. This
was only the first act of the drama, and he was determined to sit
out the performance. His determination had held good; it had kept
him going some eighteen months more, till the time of his return
to Rome with Lord Warburton. It had given him indeed such an air
of intending to live indefinitely that Mrs. Touchett, though more
accessible to confusions of thought in the matter of this
strange, unremunerative--and unremunerated--son of hers than she
had ever been before, had, as we have learned, not scrupled to
embark for a distant land. If Ralph had been kept alive by
suspense it was with a good deal of the same emotion--the
excitement of wondering in what state she should find him--that
Isabel mounted to his apartment the day after Lord Warburton had
notified her of his arrival in Rome.
She spent an hour with him; it was the first of several visits.
Gilbert Osmond called on him punctually, and on their sending
their carriage for him Ralph came more than once to Palazzo
Roccanera. A fortnight elapsed, at the end of which Ralph
announced to Lord Warburton that he thought after all he wouldn't
go to Sicily. The two men had been dining together after a day
spent by the latter in ranging about the Campagna. They had left
the table, and Warburton, before the chimney, was lighting a
cigar, which he instantly removed from his lips.
"Won't go to Sicily? Where then will you go?"
"Well, I guess I won't go anywhere," said Ralph, from the sofa,
all shamelessly.
"Do you mean you'll return to England?"
"Oh dear no; I'll stay in Rome."
"Rome won't do for you. Rome's not warm enough."
"It will have to do. I'll make it do. See how well I've been."
Lord Warburton looked at him a while, puffing a cigar and as if
trying to see it. "You've been better than you were on the
journey, certainly. I wonder how you lived through that. But I
don't understand your condition. I recommend you to try Sicily."
"I can't try," said poor Ralph. "I've done trying. I can't move
further. I can't face that journey. Fancy me between Scylla and
Charybdis! I don't want to die on the Sicilian plains--to be
snatched away, like Proserpine in the same locality, to the
Plutonian shades."
"What the deuce then did you come for?" his lordship enquired.
"Because the idea took me. I see it won't do. It really doesn't
matter where I am now. I've exhausted all remedies, I've
swallowed all climates. As I'm here I'll stay. I haven't a single
cousin in Sicily--much less a married one."
"Your cousin's certainly an inducement. But what does the doctor
say?"
"I haven't asked him, and I don't care a fig. If I die here Mrs.
Osmond will bury me. But I shall not die here."
"I hope not." Lord Warburton continued to smoke reflectively.
"Well, I must say," he resumed, "for myself I'm very glad you
don't insist on Sicily. I had a horror of that journey."
"Ah, but for you it needn't have mattered. I had no idea of
dragging you in my train."
"I certainly didn't mean to let you go alone."
"My dear Warburton, I never expected you to come further than
this," Ralph cried.
"I should have gone with you and seen you settled," said Lord
Warburton.
"You're a very good Christian. You're a very kind man."
"Then I should have come back here."
"And then you'd have gone to England."
"No, no; I should have stayed."
"Well," said Ralph, "if that's what we are both up to, I don't
see where Sicily comes in!"
His companion was silent; he sat staring at the fire. At last,
looking up, "I say, tell me this," he broke out; "did you really
mean to go to Sicily when we started?"
"Ah, vous m'en demandez trop! Let me put a question first. Did
you come with me quite--platonically?"
"I don't know what you mean by that. I wanted to come abroad."
"I suspect we've each been playing our little game."
"Speak for yourself. I made no secret whatever of my desiring to
be here a while."
"Yes, I remember you said you wished to see the Minister of
Foreign Affairs."
"I've seen him three times. He's very amusing."
"I think you've forgotten what you came for," said Ralph.
"Perhaps I have," his companion answered rather gravely.
These two were gentlemen of a race which is not distinguished by
the absence of reserve, and they had travelled together from
London to Rome without an allusion to matters that were uppermost
in the mind of each. There was an old subject they had once
discussed, but it had lost its recognised place in their attention,
and even after their arrival in Rome, where many things led back
to it, they had kept the same half-diffident, half-confident
silence.
"I recommend you to get the doctor's consent, all the same," Lord
Warburton went on, abruptly, after an interval.
"The doctor's consent will spoil it. I never have it when I can
help it."
"What then does Mrs. Osmond think?" Ralph's friend demanded.
I've not told her. She'll probably say that Rome's too cold and
even offer to go with me to Catania. She's capable of that."
"In your place I should like it."
"Her husband won't like it."
"Ah well, I can fancy that; though it seems to me you're not
bound to mind his likings. They're his affair."
"I don't want to make any more trouble between them," said Ralph.
"Is there so much already?"
"There's complete preparation for it. Her going off with me would
make the explosion. Osmond isn't fond of his wife's cousin."
"Then of course he'd make a row. But won't he make a row if you
stop here?"
"That's what I want to see. He made one the last time I was in
Rome, and then I thought it my duty to disappear. Now I think
it's my duty to stop and defend her."
"My dear Touchett, your defensive powers--!" Lord Warburton began
with a smile. But he saw something in his companion's face that
checked him. "Your duty, in these premises, seems to me rather a
nice question," he observed instead.
Ralph for a short time answered nothing. "It's true that my
defensive powers are small," he returned at last; "but as my
aggressive ones are still smaller Osmond may after all not think
me worth his gunpowder. At any rate," he added, "there are things
I'm curious to see."
"You're sacrificing your health to your curiosity then?"
"I'm not much interested in my health, and I'm deeply interested
in Mrs. Osmond."
"So am I. But not as I once was," Lord Warburton added quickly.
This was one of the allusions he had not hitherto found occasion
to make.
"Does she strike you as very happy?" Ralph enquired, emboldened
by this confidence.
"Well, I don't know; I've hardly thought. She told me the other
night she was happy."
"Ah, she told YOU, of course," Ralph exclaimed, smiling.
"I don't know that. It seems to me I was rather the sort of
person she might have complained to."
"Complained? She'll never complain. She has done it--what she HAS
done--and she knows it. She'll complain to you least of all.
She's very careful."
"She needn't be. I don't mean to make love to her again."
"I'm delighted to hear it. There can be no doubt at least of YOUR
duty."
"Ah no," said Lord Warburton gravely; "none!"
"Permit me to ask," Ralph went on, "whether it's to bring out the
fact that you don't mean to make love to her that you're so very
civil to the little girl?"
Lord Warburton gave a slight start; he got up and stood before
the fire, looking at it hard. "Does that strike you as very
ridiculous?"
"Ridiculous? Not in the least, if you really like her."
"I think her a delightful little person. I don't know when a girl
of that age has pleased me more."
"She's a charming creature. Ah, she at least is genuine."
"Of course there's the difference in our ages--more than twenty
years."
"My dear Warburton," said Ralph, "are you serious?"
"Perfectly serious--as far as I've got."
"I'm very glad. And, heaven help us," cried Ralph, "how
cheered-up old Osmond will be!"
His companion frowned. "I say, don't spoil it. I shouldn't
propose for his daughter to please HIM."
"He'll have the perversity to be pleased all the same."
"He's not so fond of me as that," said his lordship.
"As that? My dear Warburton, the drawback of your position is
that people needn't be fond of you at all to wish to be connected
with you. Now, with me in such a case, I should have the happy
confidence that they loved me."
Lord Warburton seemed scarcely in the mood for doing justice to
general axioms--he was thinking of a special case. "Do you judge
she'll be pleased?"
"The girl herself? Delighted, surely."
"No, no; I mean Mrs. Osmond."
Ralph looked at him a moment. "My dear fellow, what has she to do
with it?"
"Whatever she chooses. She's very fond of Pansy."
"Very true--very true." And Ralph slowly got up. "It's an
interesting question--how far her fondness for Pansy will carry
her." He stood there a moment with his hands in his pockets and
rather a clouded brow. "I hope, you know, that you're very--very
sure. The deuce!" he broke off. "I don't know how to say it."
"Yes, you do; you know how to say everything."
"Well, it's awkward. I hope you're sure that among Miss Osmond's
merits her being--a--so near her stepmother isn't a leading one?"
"Good heavens, Touchett!" cried Lord Warburton angrily, "for what
do you take me?" _
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