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_ She had answered nothing because his words had put the situation
before her and she was absorbed in looking at it. There was
something in them that suddenly made vibrations deep, so that she
had been afraid to trust herself to speak. After he had gone she
leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes; and for a long
time, far into the night and still further, she sat in the still
drawing-room, given up to her meditation. A servant came in to
attend to the fire, and she bade him bring fresh candles and then
go to bed. Osmond had told her to think of what he had said; and
she did so indeed, and of many other things. The suggestion from
another that she had a definite influence on Lord Warburton--this
had given her the start that accompanies unexpected recognition.
Was it true that there was something still between them that might
be a handle to make him declare himself to Pansy--a susceptibility,
on his part, to approval, a desire to do what would please her?
Isabel had hitherto not asked herself the question, because she
had not been forced; but now that it was directly presented to
her she saw the answer, and the answer frightened her. Yes, there
was something--something on Lord Warburton's part. When he had
first come to Rome she believed the link that united them to be
completely snapped; but little by little she had been reminded
that it had yet a palpable existence. It was as thin as a hair,
but there were moments when she seemed to hear it vibrate. For
herself nothing was changed; what she once thought of him she
always thought; it was needless this feeling should change; it
seemed to her in fact a better feeling than ever. But he? had
he still the idea that she might be more to him than other women?
Had he the wish to profit by the memory of the few moments of
intimacy through which they had once passed? Isabel knew she had
read some of the signs of such a disposition. But what were his
hopes, his pretensions, and in what strange way were they mingled
with his evidently very sincere appreciation of poor Pansy? Was
he in love with Gilbert Osmond's wife, and if so what comfort did
he expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was
not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her
stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the
advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to
Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small
creature's own--was this the service her husband had asked of her?
This at any rate was the duty with which she found herself
confronted--from the moment she admitted to herself that her old
friend had still an uneradicated predilection for her society. It
was not an agreeable task; it was in fact a repulsive one. She
asked herself with dismay whether Lord Warburton were pretending
to be in love with Pansy in order to cultivate another
satisfaction and what might be called other chances. Of this
refinement of duplicity she presently acquitted him; she
preferred to believe him in perfect good faith. But if his
admiration for Pansy were a delusion this was scarcely better
than its being an affectation. Isabel wandered among these ugly
possibilities until she had completely lost her way; some of them,
as she suddenly encountered them, seemed ugly enough. Then she
broke out of the labyrinth, rubbing her eyes, and declared that
her imagination surely did her little honour and that her
husband's did him even less. Lord Warburton was as disinterested
as he need be, and she was no more to him than she need wish. She
would rest upon this till the contrary should be proved; proved
more effectually than by a cynical intimation of Osmond's.
Such a resolution, however, brought her this evening but little
peace, for her soul was haunted with terrors which crowded to the
foreground of thought as quickly as a place was made for them.
What had suddenly set them into livelier motion she hardly knew,
unless it were the strange impression she had received in the
afternoon of her husband's being in more direct communication with
Madame Merle than she suspected. That impression came back to her
from time to time, and now she wondered it had never come before.
Besides this, her short interview with Osmond half an hour ago was
a striking example of his faculty for making everything wither
that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked at. It
was very well to undertake to give him a proof of loyalty; the
real fact was that the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a
presumption against it. It was as if he had had the evil eye; as
if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was the
fault in himself, or only in the deep mistrust she had conceived
for him? This mistrust was now the clearest result of their short
married life; a gulf had opened between them over which they
looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a
declaration of the deception suffered. It was a strange
opposition, of the like of which she had never dreamed--an
opposition in which the vital principle of the one was a thing of
contempt to the other. It was not her fault--she had practised no
deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all
the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had
suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a
dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading
to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem
to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of
exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led
rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and
depression where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was
heard as from above, and where it served to deepen the feeling of
failure. It was her deep distrust of her husband--this was what
darkened the world. That is a sentiment easily indicated, but not
so easily explained, and so composite in its character that much
time and still more suffering had been needed to bring it to its
actual perfection. Suffering, with Isabel, was an active
condition; it was not a chill, a stupor, a despair; it was a
passion of thought, of speculation, of response to every pressure.
She flattered herself that she had kept her failing faith to
herself, however,--that no one suspected it but Osmond. Oh, he
knew it, and there were times when she thought he enjoyed it. It
had come gradually--it was not till the first year of their life
together, so admirably intimate at first, had closed that she had
taken the alarm. Then the shadows had begun to gather; it was as
if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights
out one by one. The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she
could still see her way in it. But it steadily deepened, and if
now and again it had occasionally lifted there were certain
corners of her prospect that were impenetrably black. These
shadows were not an emanation from her own mind: she was very
sure of that; she had done her best to be just and temperate, to
see only the truth. They were a part, they were a kind of
creation and consequence, of her husband's very presence. They
were not his misdeeds, his turpitudes; she accused him of nothing
--that is but of one thing, which was NOT a crime. She knew of no
wrong he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: she
simply believed he hated her. That was all she accused him of,
and the miserable part of it was precisely that it was not a
crime, for against a crime she might have found redress. He had
discovered that she was so different, that she was not what he had
believed she would prove to be. He had thought at first he could
change her, and she had done her best to be what he would like.
But she was, after all, herself--she couldn't help that; and now
there was no use pretending, wearing a mask or a dress, for he
knew her and had made up his mind. She was not afraid of him; she
had no apprehension he would hurt her; for the ill-will he bore
her was not of that sort. He would if possible never give her a
pretext, never put himself in the wrong. Isabel, scanning the
future with dry, fixed eyes, saw that he would have the better of
her there. She would give him many pretexts, she would often put
herself in the wrong. There were times when she almost pitied
him; for if she had not deceived him in intention she understood
how completely she must have done so in fact. She had effaced
herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small,
pretending there was less of her than there really was. It was
because she had been under the extraordinary charm that he, on
his side, had taken pains to put forth. He was not changed; he
had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any
more than she. But she had seen only half his nature then, as one
saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow
of the earth. She saw the full moon now--she saw the whole man.
She had kept still, as it were, so that he should have a free
field, and yet in spite of this she had mistaken a part for the
whole.
Ah, she had been immensely under the charm! It had not passed
away; it was there still: she still knew perfectly what it was
that made Osmond delightful when he chose to be. He had wished to
be when he made love to her, and as she had wished to be charmed
it was not wonderful he had succeeded. He had succeeded because he
had been sincere; it never occurred to her now to deny him that.
He admired her--he had told her why: because she was the most
imaginative woman he had known. It might very well have been true;
for during those months she had imagined a world of things that
had no substance. She had had a more wondrous vision of him, fed
through charmed senses and oh such a stirred fancy!--she had not
read him right. A certain combination of features had touched her,
and in them she had seen the most striking of figures. That he was
poor and lonely and yet that somehow he was noble--that was what
had interested her and seemed to give her her opportunity. There
had been an indefinable beauty about him--in his situation, in
his mind, in his face. She had felt at the same time that he was
helpless and ineffectual, but the feeling had taken the form of a
tenderness which was the very flower of respect. He was like a
sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the
tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea. It was in all this
she had found her occasion. She would launch his boat for him; she
would be his providence; it would be a good thing to love him. And
she had loved him, she had so anxiously and yet so ardently given
herself--a good deal for what she found in him, but a good deal
also for what she brought him and what might enrich the gift. As
she looked back at the passion of those full weeks she perceived
in it a kind of maternal strain--the happiness of a woman who felt
that she was a contributor, that she came with charged hands. But
for her money, as she saw to-day, she would never have done it.
And then her mind wandered off to poor Mr. Touchett, sleeping
under English turf, the beneficent author of infinite woe! For
this was the fantastic fact. At bottom her money had been a
burden, had been on her mind, which was filled with the desire to
transfer the weight of it to some other conscience, to some more
prepared receptacle. What would lighten her own conscience more
effectually than to make it over to the man with the best taste in
the world? Unless she should have given it to a hospital there
would have been nothing better she could do with it; and there was
no charitable institution in which she had been as much interested
as in Gilbert Osmond. He would use her fortune in a way that would
make her think better of it and rub off a certain grossness
attaching to the good luck of an unexpected inheritance. There had
been nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds;
the delicacy had been all in Mr. Touchett's leaving them to her.
But to marry Gilbert Osmond and bring him such a portion--in
that there would be delicacy for her as well. There would be less
for him--that was true; but that was his affair, and if he loved
her he wouldn't object to her being rich. Had he not had the
courage to say he was glad she was rich?
Isabel's cheek burned when she asked herself if she had really
married on a factitious theory, in order to do something finely
appreciable with her money. But she was able to answer quickly
enough that this was only half the story. It was because a certain
ardour took possession of her--a sense of the earnestness of his
affection and a delight in his personal qualities. He was better
than any one else. This supreme conviction had filled her life for
months, and enough of it still remained to prove to her that she
could not have done otherwise. The finest--in the sense of being
the subtlest--manly organism she had ever known had become her
property, and the recognition of her having but to put out her
hands and take it had been originally a sort of act of devotion.
She had not been mistaken about the beauty of his mind; she knew
that organ perfectly now. She had lived with it, she had lived IN
it almost--it appeared to have become her habitation. If she had
been captured it had taken a firm hand to seize her; that
reflection perhaps had some worth. A mind more ingenious, more
pliant, more cultivated, more trained to admirable exercises, she
had not encountered; and it was this exquisite instrument she had
now to reckon with. She lost herself in infinite dismay when she
thought of the magnitude of HIS deception. It was a wonder,
perhaps, in view of this, that he didn't hate her more. She
remembered perfectly the first sign he had given of it--it had
been like the bell that was to ring up the curtain upon the real
drama of their life. He said to her one day that she had too many
ideas and that she must get rid of them. He had told her that
already, before their marriage; but then she had not noticed it:
it had come back to her only afterwards. This time she might well
have noticed it, because he had really meant it. The words had
been nothing superficially; but when in the light of deepening
experience she had looked into them they had then appeared
portentous. He had really meant it--he would have liked her to
have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance. She had known
she had too many ideas; she had more even than he had supposed,
many more than she had expressed to him when he had asked her to
marry him. Yes, she HAD been hypocritical; she had liked him so
much. She had too many ideas for herself; but that was just what
one married for, to share them with some one else. One couldn't
pluck them up by the roots, though of course one might suppress
them, be careful not to utter them. It had not been this, however,
his objecting to her opinions; this had been nothing. She had no
opinions--none that she would not have been eager to sacrifice in
the satisfaction of feeling herself loved for it. What he had
meant had been the whole thing--her character, the way she felt,
the way she judged. This was what she had kept in reserve; this
was what he had not known until he had found himself--with the
door closed behind, as it were--set down face to face with it.
She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a
personal offence. Heaven knew that now at least it was a very
humble, accommodating way! The strange thing was that she should
not have suspected from the first that his own had been so
different. She had thought it so large, so enlightened, so
perfectly that of an honest man and a gentleman. Hadn't he assured
her that he had no superstitions, no dull limitations, no
prejudices that had lost their freshness? Hadn't he all the
appearance of a man living in the open air of the world,
indifferent to small considerations, caring only for truth
and knowledge and believing that two intelligent people ought
to look for them together and, whether they found them or not,
find at least some happiness in the search? He had told her he
loved the conventional; but there was a sense in which this seemed
a noble declaration. In that sense, that of the love of harmony
and order and decency and of all the stately offices of life, she
went with him freely, and his warning had contained nothing
ominous. But when, as the months had elapsed, she had followed him
further and he had led her into the mansion of his own habitation,
then, THEN she had seen where she really was.
She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which
she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four
walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the
rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of
dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond's beautiful mind gave
it neither light nor air; Osmond's beautiful mind indeed seemed
to peep down from a small high window and mock at her. Of course
it had not been physical suffering; for physical suffering there
might have been a remedy. She could come and go; she had her
liberty; her husband was perfectly polite. He took himself so
seriously; it was something appalling. Under all his culture, his
cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his
knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a
bank of flowers. She had taken him seriously, but she had not
taken him so seriously as that. How could she--especially when
she had known him better? She was to think of him as he thought
of himself--as the first gentleman in Europe. So it was that she
had thought of him at first, and that indeed was the reason she
had married him. But when she began to see what it implied she
drew back; there was more in the bond than she had meant to put
her name to. It implied a sovereign contempt for every one but
some three or four very exalted people whom he envied, and for
everything in the world but half a dozen ideas of his own. That
was very well; she would have gone with him even there a long
distance; for he pointed out to her so much of the baseness and
shabbiness of life, opened her eyes so wide to the stupidity, the
depravity, the ignorance of mankind, that she had been properly
impressed with the infinite vulgarity of things and of the virtue
of keeping one's self unspotted by it. But this base, if noble
world, it appeared, was after all what one was to live for; one
was to keep it forever in one's eye, in order not to enlighten or
convert or redeem it, but to extract from it some recognition of
one's own superiority. On the one hand it was despicable, but
on the other it afforded a standard. Osmond had talked to Isabel
about his renunciation, his indifference, the ease with which he
dispensed with the usual aids to success; and all this had seemed
to her admirable. She had thought it a grand indifference, an
exquisite independence. But indifference was really the last of his
qualities; she had never seen any one who thought so much of
others. For herself, avowedly, the world had always interested her
and the study of her fellow creatures been her constant passion.
She would have been willing, however, to renounce all her
curiosities and sympathies for the sake of a personal life, if
the person concerned had only been able to make her believe it
was a gain! This at least was her present conviction; and the
thing certainly would have been easier than to care for society
as Osmond cared for it.
He was unable to live without it, and she saw that he had never
really done so; he had looked at it out of his window even when he
appeared to be most detached from it. He had his ideal, just as
she had tried to have hers; only it was strange that people should
seek for justice in such different quarters. His ideal was a
conception of high prosperity and propriety, of the aristocratic
life, which she now saw that he deemed himself always, in essence
at least, to have led. He had never lapsed from it for an hour; he
would never have recovered from the shame of doing so. That again
was very well; here too she would have agreed; but they attached
such different ideas, such different associations and desires, to
the same formulas. Her notion of the aristocratic life was simply
the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge
would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of
enjoyment. But for Osmond it was altogether a thing of forms, a
conscious, calculated attitude. He was fond of the old, the
consecrated, the transmitted; so was she, but she pretended to do
what she chose with it. He had an immense esteem for tradition; he
had told her once that the best thing in the world was to have it,
but that if one was so unfortunate as not to have it one must
immediately proceed to make it. She knew that he meant by this
that she hadn't it, but that he was better off; though from what
source he had derived his traditions she never learned. He had a
very large collection of them, however; that was very certain,
and after a little she began to see. The great thing was to act
in accordance with them; the great thing not only for him but for
her. Isabel had an undefined conviction that to serve for another
person than their proprietor traditions must be of a thoroughly
superior kind; but she nevertheless assented to this intimation
that she too must march to the stately music that floated down
from unknown periods in her husband's past; she who of old had
been so free of step, so desultory, so devious, so much the
reverse of processional. There were certain things they must
do, a certain posture they must take, certain people they must
know and not know. When she saw this rigid system close about her,
draped though it was in pictured tapestries, that sense of
darkness and suffocation of which I have spoken took possession of
her; she seemed shut up with an odour of mould and decay. She had
resisted of course; at first very humorously, ironically,
tenderly; then, as the situation grew more serious, eagerly,
passionately, pleadingly. She had pleaded the cause of freedom, of
doing as they chose, of not caring for the aspect and denomination
of their life--the cause of other instincts and longings, of
quite another ideal.
Then it was that her husband's personality, touched as it never
had been, stepped forth and stood erect. The things she had said
were answered only by his scorn, and she could see he was
ineffably ashamed of her. What did he think of her--that she was
base, vulgar, ignoble? He at least knew now that she had no
traditions! It had not been in hsis prevision of things that she
should reveal such flatness; her sentiments were worthy of a
radical newspaper or a Unitarian preacher. The real offence, as
she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at
all. Her mind was to be his--attached to his own like a small
garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and
water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an
occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a
proprietor already far-reaching. He didn't wish her to be stupid.
On the contrary, it was because she was clever that she had
pleased him. But he expected her intelligence to operate
altogether in his favour, and so far from desiring her mind to be
a blank he had flattered himself that it would be richly
receptive. He had expected his wife to feel with him and for him,
to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his preferences; and
Isabel was obliged to confess that this was no great insolence on
the part of a man so accomplished and a husband originally at
least so tender. But there were certain things she could never
take in. To begin with, they were hideously unclean. She was not
a daughter of the Puritans, but for all that she believed in such
a thing as chastity and even as decency. It would appear that
Osmond was far from doing anything of the sort; some of his
traditions made her push back her skirts. Did all women have
lovers? Did they all lie and even the best have their price?
Were there only three or four that didn't deceive their husbands?
When Isabel heard such things she felt a greater scorn for them
than for the gossip of a village parlour--a scorn that kept its
freshness in a very tainted air. There was the taint of her
sister-in-law: did her husband judge only by the Countess Gemini?
This lady very often lied, and she had practised deceptions that
were not simply verbal. It was enough to find these facts assumed
among Osmond's traditions--it was enough without giving them such
a general extension. It was her scorn of his assumptions, it was
this that made him draw himself up. He had plenty of contempt,
and it was proper his wife should be as well furnished; but that
she should turn the hot light of her disdain upon his own
conception of things--this was a danger he had not allowed for.
He believed he should have regulated her emotions before she came
to it; and Isabel could easily imagine how his ears had scorched
on his discovering he had been too confident. When one had a wife
who gave one that sensation there was nothing left but to hate
her.
She was morally certain now that this feeling of hatred, which at
first had been a refuge and a refreshment, had become the
occupation and comfort of his life. The feeling was deep, because
it was sincere; he had had the revelation that she could after all
dispense with him. If to herself the idea was startling, if it
presented itself at first as a kind of infidelity, a capacity for
pollution, what infinite effect might it not be expected to have
had upon HIM? It was very simple; he despised her; she had no
traditions and the moral horizon of a Unitarian minister. Poor
Isabel, who had never been able to understand Unitarianism! This
was the certitude she had been living with now for a time that she
had ceased to measure. What was coming--what was before them? That
was her constant question. What would he do--what ought SHE to do?
When a man hated his wife what did it lead to? She didn't hate
him, that she was sure of, for every little while she felt a
passionate wish to give him a pleasant surprise. Very often,
however, she felt afraid, and it used to come over her, as I have
intimated, that she had deceived him at the very first. They were
strangely married, at all events, and it was a horrible life.
Until that morning he had scarcely spoken to her for a week; his
manner was as dry as a burned-out fire. She knew there was a
special reason; he was displeased at Ralph Touchett's staying on
in Rome. He thought she saw too much of her cousin--he had told
her a week before it was indecent she should go to him at his
hotel. He would have said more than this if Ralph's invalid state
had not appeared to make it brutal to denounce him; but having had
to contain himself had only deepened his disgust. Isabel read all
this as she would have read the hour on the clock-face; she was as
perfectly aware that the sight of her interest in her cousin
stirred her husband's rage as if Osmond had locked her into her
room--which she was sure was what he wanted to do. It was her
honest belief that on the whole she was not defiant, but she
certainly couldn't pretend to be indifferent to Ralph. She
believed he was dying at last and that she should never see him
again, and this gave her a tenderness for him that she had never
known before. Nothing was a pleasure to her now; how could
anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown
away her life? There was an everlasting weight on her heart--
there was a livid light on everything. But Ralph's little visit
was a lamp in the darkness; for the hour that she sat with him
her ache for herself became somehow her ache for HIM. She felt
to-day as if he had been her brother. She had never had a
brother, but if she had and she were in trouble and he were
dying, he would be dear to her as Ralph was. Ah yes, if Gilbert
was jealous of her there was perhaps some reason; it didn't make
Gilbert look better to sit for half an hour with Ralph. It was
not that they talked of him--it was not that she complained. His
name was never uttered between them. It was simply that Ralph was
generous and that her husband was not. There was something in
Ralph's talk, in his smile, in the mere fact of his being in
Rome, that made the blasted circle round which she walked more
spacious. He made her feel the good of the world; he made her
feel what might have been. He was after all as intelligent as
Osmond--quite apart from his being better. And thus it seemed to
her an act of devotion to conceal her misery from him. She
concealed it elaborately; she was perpetually, in their talk,
hanging out curtains and before her again--it lived before her
again,--it had never had time to die--that morning in the garden
at Florence when he had warned her against Osmond. She had only
to close her eyes to see the place, to hear his voice, to feel
the warm, sweet air. How could he have known? What a mystery,
what a wonder of wisdom! As intelligent as Gilbert? He was much
more intelligent--to arrive at such a judgement as that. Gilbert
had never been so deep, so just. She had told him then that from
her at least he should never know if he was right; and this was
what she was taking care of now. It gave her plenty to do; there
was passion, exaltation, religion in it. Women find their religion
sometimes in strange exercises, and Isabel at present, in playing
a part before her cousin, had an idea that she was doing him a
kindness. It would have been a kindness perhaps if he had been for
a single instant a dupe. As it was, the kindness consisted mainly
in trying to make him believe that he had once wounded her greatly
and that the event had put him to shame, but that, as she was very
generous and he was so ill, she bore him no grudge and even
considerately forbore to flaunt her happiness in his face. Ralph
smiled to himself, as he lay on his sofa, at this extraordinary
form of consideration; but he forgave her for having forgiven him.
She didn't wish him to have the pain of knowing she was unhappy:
that was the great thing, and it didn't matter that such knowledge
would rather have righted him.
For herself, she lingered in the soundless saloon long after the
fire had gone out. There was no danger of her feeling the cold;
she was in a fever. She heard the small hours strike, and then the
great ones, but her vigil took no heed of time. Her mind, assailed
by visions, was in a state of extraordinary activity, and her
visions might as well come to her there, where she sat up to meet
them, as on her pillow, to make a mockery of rest. As I have
said, she believed she was not defiant, and what could be a
better proof of it than that she should linger there half the
night, trying to persuade herself that there was no reason why
Pansy shouldn't be married as you would put a letter in the
post-office? When the clock struck four she got up; she was
going to bed at last, for the lamp had long since gone out and
the candles burned down to their sockets. But even then she
stopped again in the middle of the room and stood there gazing at
a remembered vision--that of her husband and Madame Merle
unconsciously and familiarly associated. _
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