________________________________________________
_ It was from Henrietta Stackpole that she learned how Caspar
Goodwood had come to Rome; an event that took place three days
after Lord Warburton's departure. This latter fact had been
preceded by an incident of some importance to Isabel--the
temporary absence, once again, of Madame Merle, who had gone to
Naples to stay with a friend, the happy possessor of a villa at
Posilippo. Madame Merle had ceased to minister to Isabel's
happiness, who found herself wondering whether the most discreet
of women might not also by chance be the most dangerous.
Sometimes, at night, she had strange visions; she seemed to see
her husband and her friend--his friend--in dim, indistinguishable
combination. It seemed to her that she had not done with her;
this lady had something in reserve. Isabel's imagination applied
itself actively to this elusive point, but every now and then it
was checked by a nameless dread, so that when the charming woman
was away from Rome she had almost a consciousness of respite. She
had already learned from Miss Stackpole that Caspar Goodwood was
in Europe, Henrietta having written to make it known to her
immediately after meeting him in Paris. He himself never wrote to
Isabel, and though he was in Europe she thought it very possible
he might not desire to see her. Their last interview, before her
marriage, had had quite the character of a complete rupture; if
she remembered rightly he had said he wished to take his last
look at her. Since then he had been the most discordant survival
of her earlier time--the only one in fact with which a permanent
pain was associated. He had left her that morning with a sense of
the most superfluous of shocks: it was like a collision between
vessels in broad daylight. There had been no mist, no hidden
current to excuse it, and she herself had only wished to steer
wide. He had bumped against her prow, however, while her hand was
on the tiller, and--to complete the metaphor--had given the
lighter vessel a strain which still occasionally betrayed itself
in a faint creaking. It had been horrid to see him, because he
represented the only serious harm that (to her belief) she had
ever done in the world: he was the only person with an
unsatisfied claim on her. She had made him unhappy, she couldn't
help it; and his unhappiness was a grim reality. She had cried
with rage, after he had left her, at--she hardly knew what: she
tried to think it had been at his want of consideration. He had
come to her with his unhappiness when her own bliss was so
perfect; he had done his best to darken the brightness of those
pure rays. He had not been violent, and yet there had been a
violence in the impression. There had been a violence at any rate
in something somewhere; perhaps it was only in her own fit of
weeping and in that after-sense of the same which had lasted
three or four days.
The effect of his final appeal had in short faded away, and all
the first year of her marriage he had dropped out of her books.
He was a thankless subject of reference; it was disagreeable to
have to think of a person who was sore and sombre about you and
whom you could yet do nothing to relieve. It would have been
different if she had been able to doubt, even a little, of his
unreconciled state, as she doubted of Lord Warburton's;
unfortunately it was beyond question, and this aggressive,
uncompromising look of it was just what made it unattractive. She
could never say to herself that here was a sufferer who had
compensations, as she was able to say in the case of her English
suitor. She had no faith in Mr. Goodwood's compensations and no
esteem for them. A cotton factory was not a compensation for
anything--least of all for having failed to marry Isabel Archer.
And yet, beyond that, she hardly knew what he had--save of course
his intrinsic qualities. Oh, he was intrinsic enough; she never
thought of his even looking for artificial aids. If he extended
his business--that, to the best of her belief, was the only form
exertion could take with him--it would be because it was an
enterprising thing, or good for the business; not in the least
because he might hope it would overlay the past. This gave his
figure a kind of bareness and bleakness which made the accident
of meeting it in memory or in apprehension a peculiar concussion;
it was deficient in the social drapery commonly muffling, in an
overcivilized age, the sharpness of human contacts. His perfect
silence, moreover, the fact that she never heard from him and
very seldom heard any mention of him, deepened this impression of
his loneliness. She asked Lily for news of him, from time to
time; but Lily knew nothing of Boston--her imagination was all
bounded on the east by Madison Avenue. As time went on Isabel had
thought of him oftener, and with fewer restrictions; she had had
more than once the idea of writing to him. She had never told her
husband about him--never let Osmond know of his visits to her in
Florence; a reserve not dictated in the early period by a want of
confidence in Osmond, but simply by the consideration that the
young man's disappointment was not her secret but his own. It
would be wrong of her, she had believed, to convey it to another,
and Mr. Goodwood's affairs could have, after all, little interest
for Gilbert. When it had come to the point she had never written
to him; it seemed to her that, considering his grievance, the
least she could do was to let him alone. Nevertheless she would
have been glad to be in some way nearer to him. It was not that
it ever occurred to her that she might have married him; even
after the consequences of her actual union had grown vivid to her
that particular reflection, though she indulged in so many, had
not had the assurance to present itself. But on finding herself
in trouble he had become a member of that circle of things with
which she wished to set herself right. I have mentioned how
passionately she needed to feel that her unhappiness should not
have come to her through her own fault. She had no near prospect
of dying, and yet she wished to make her peace with the world--
to put her spiritual affairs in order. It came back to her from
time to time that there was an account still to be settled with
Caspar, and she saw herself disposed or able to settle it to-day
on terms easier for him than ever before. Still, when she learned
he was coming to Rome she felt all afraid; it would be more
disagreeable for him than for any one else to make out--since he
WOULD make it out, as over a falsified balance-sheet or something
of that sort--the intimate disarray of her affairs. Deep in her
breast she believed that he had invested his all in her happiness,
while the others had invested only a part. He was one more person
from whom she should have to conceal her stress. She was reassured,
however, after he arrived in Rome, for he spent several days
without coming to see her.
Henrietta Stackpole, it may well be imagined, was more punctual,
and Isabel was largely favoured with the society of her friend.
She threw herself into it, for now that she had made such a point
of keeping her conscience clear, that was one way of proving she
had not been superficial--the more so as the years, in their
flight, had rather enriched than blighted those peculiarities
which had been humorously criticised by persons less interested
than Isabel, and which were still marked enough to give loyalty a
spice of heroism. Henrietta was as keen and quick and fresh as
ever, and as neat and bright and fair. Her remarkably open eyes,
lighted like great glazed railway-stations, had put up no
shutters; her attire had lost none of its crispness, her opinions
none of their national reference. She was by no means quite
unchanged, however it struck Isabel she had grown vague. Of old
she had never been vague; though undertaking many enquiries at
once, she had managed to be entire and pointed about each. She
had a reason for everything she did; she fairly bristled with
motives. Formerly, when she came to Europe it was because she
wished to see it, but now, having already seen it, she had no
such excuse. She didn't for a moment pretend that the desire to
examine decaying civilisations had anything to do with her
present enterprise; her journey was rather an expression of her
independence of the old world than of a sense of further
obligations to it. "It's nothing to come to Europe," she said to
Isabel; "it doesn't seem to me one needs so many reasons for
that. It is something to stay at home; this is much more
important." It was not therefore with a sense of doing anything
very important that she treated herself to another pilgrimage to
Rome; she had seen the place before and carefully inspected it;
her present act was simply a sign of familiarity, of her knowing
all about it, of her having as good a right as any one else to be
there. This was all very well, and Henrietta was restless; she
had a perfect right to be restless too, if one came to that. But
she had after all a better reason for coming to Rome than that
she cared for it so little. Her friend easily recognised it, and
with it the worth of the other's fidelity. She had crossed the
stormy ocean in midwinter because she had guessed that Isabel was
sad. Henrietta guessed a great deal, but she had never guessed so
happily as that. Isabel's satisfactions just now were few, but
even if they had been more numerous there would still have been
something of individual joy in her sense of being justified in
having always thought highly of Henrietta. She had made large
concessions with regard to her, and had yet insisted that, with
all abatements, she was very valuable. It was not her own
triumph, however, that she found good; it was simply the relief
of confessing to this confidant, the first person to whom she had
owned it, that she was not in the least at her ease. Henrietta
had herself approached this point with the smallest possible
delay, and had accused her to her face of being wretched. She was
a woman, she was a sister; she was not Ralph, nor Lord Warburton,
nor Caspar Goodwood, and Isabel could speak.
"Yes, I'm wretched," she said very mildly. She hated to hear
herself say it; she tried to say it as judicially as possible.
"What does he do to you?" Henrietta asked, frowning as if she
were enquiring into the operations of a quack doctor.
"He does nothing. But he doesn't like me."
"He's very hard to please!" cried Miss Stackpole. "Why don't you
leave him?"
"I can't change that way," Isabel said.
"Why not, I should like to know? You won't confess that you've
made a mistake. You're too proud."
"I don't know whether I'm too proud. But I can't publish my
mistake. I don't think that's decent. I'd much rather die."
"You won't think so always," said Henrietta.
"I don't know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it
seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one's
deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free;
it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can't
change that way," Isabel repeated.
"You HAVE changed, in spite of the impossibility. I hope you
don't mean to say you like him."
Isabel debated. "No, I don't like him. I can tell you, because
I'm weary of my secret. But that's enough; I can't announce it on
the housetops."
Henrietta gave a laugh. "Don't you think you're rather too
considerate?"
"It's not of him that I'm considerate--it's of myself!" Isabel
answered.
It was not surprising Gilbert Osmond should not have taken
comfort in Miss Stackpole; his instinct had naturally set him in
opposition to a young lady capable of advising his wife to
withdraw from the conjugal roof. When she arrived in Rome he had
said to Isabel that he hoped she would leave her friend the
interviewer alone; and Isabel had answered that he at least had
nothing to fear from her. She said to Henrietta that as Osmond
didn't like her she couldn't invite her to dine, but they could
easily see each other in other ways. Isabel received Miss
Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly
to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward,
on the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated
authoress with a respectful attention which Henrietta
occasionally found irritating. She complained to Isabel that Miss
Osmond had a little look as if she should remember everything one
said. "I don't want to be remembered that way," Miss Stackpole
declared; "I consider that my conversation refers only to the
moment, like the morning papers. Your stepdaughter, as she sits
there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring
them out some day against me." She could not teach herself to
think favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of
conversation, of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of
twenty, unnatural and even uncanny. Isabel presently saw that
Osmond would have liked her to urge a little the cause of her
friend, insist a little upon his receiving her, so that he might
appear to suffer for good manners' sake. Her immediate acceptance
of his objections put him too much in the wrong--it being in
effect one of the disadvantages of expressing contempt that you
cannot enjoy at the same time the credit of expressing sympathy.
Osmond held to his credit, and yet he held to his objections--
all of which were elements difficult to reconcile. The right
thing would have been that Miss Stackpole should come to dine at
Palazzo Roccanera once or twice, so that (in spite of his
superficial civility, always so great) she might judge for
herself how little pleasure it gave him. From the moment,
however, that both the ladies were so unaccommodating, there was
nothing for Osmond but to wish the lady from New York would take
herself off. It was surprising how little satisfaction he got
from his wife's friends; he took occasion to call Isabel's
attention to it.
"You're certainly not fortunate in your intimates; I wish you
might make a new collection," he said to her one morning in
reference to nothing visible at the moment, but in a tone of ripe
reflection which deprived the remark of all brutal abruptness.
"It's as if you had taken the trouble to pick out the people in
the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have
always thought a conceited ass--besides his being the most
ill-favoured animal I know. Then it's insufferably tiresome that
one can't tell him so; one must spare him on account of his
health. His health seems to me the best part of him; it gives him
privileges enjoyed by no one else. If he's so desperately ill
there's only one way to prove it; but he seems to have no mind
for that. I can't say much more for the great Warburton. When one
really thinks of it, the cool insolence of that performance was
something rare! He comes and looks at one's daughter as if she
were a suite of apartments; he tries the door-handles and looks
out of the windows, raps on the walls and almost thinks he'll
take the place. Will you be so good as to draw up a lease? Then,
on the whole, he decides that the rooms are too small; he
doesn't think he could live on a third floor; he must look out
for a piano nobile. And he goes away after having got a month's
lodging in the poor little apartment for nothing. Miss Stackpole,
however, is your most wonderful invention. She strikes me as a
kind of monster. One hasn't a nerve in one's body that she
doesn't set quivering. You know I never have admitted that she's
a woman. Do you know what she reminds me of? Of a new steel pen--
the most odious thing in nature. She talks as a steel pen writes;
aren't her letters, by the way, on ruled paper? She thinks and
moves and walks and looks exactly as she talks. You may say that
she doesn't hurt me, inasmuch as I don't see her. I don't see
her, but I hear her; I hear her all day long. Her voice is in my
ears; I can't get rid of it. I know exactly what she says, and
every inflexion of the tone in which she says it. She says
charming things about me, and they give you great comfort. I
don't like at all to think she talks about me--I feel as I should
feel if I knew the footman were wearing my hat."
Henrietta talked about Gilbert Osmond, as his wife assured him,
rather less than he suspected. She had plenty of other subjects,
in two of which the reader may be supposed to be especially
interested. She let her friend know that Caspar Goodwood had
discovered for himself that she was unhappy, though indeed her
ingenuity was unable to suggest what comfort he hoped to give her
by coming to Rome and yet not calling on her. They met him twice
in the street, but he had no appearance of seeing them; they were
driving, and he had a habit of looking straight in front of him,
as if he proposed to take in but one object at a time. Isabel
could have fancied she had seen him the day before; it must have
been with just that face and step that he had walked out of Mrs.
Touchett's door at the close of their last interview. He was
dressed just as he had been dressed on that day, Isabel
remembered the colour of his cravat; and yet in spite of this
familiar look there was a strangeness in his figure too,
something that made her feel it afresh to be rather terrible he
should have come to Rome. He looked bigger and more overtopping
than of old, and in those days he certainly reached high enough.
She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him;
but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a
February sky.
Miss Stackpole's other topic was very different; she gave Isabel
the latest news about Mr. Bantling. He had been out in the United
States the year before, and she was happy to say she had been
able to show him considerable attention. She didn't know how much
he had enjoyed it, but she would undertake to say it had done him
good; he wasn't the same man when he left as he had been when be
came. It had opened his eyes and shown him that England wasn't
everything. He had been very much liked in most places, and
thought extremely simple--more simple than the English were
commonly supposed to be. There were people who had thought him
affected; she didn't know whether they meant that his simplicity
was an affectation. Some of his questions were too discouraging;
he thought all the chambermaids were farmers' daughters--or all
the farmers' daughters were chambermaids--she couldn't exactly
remember which. He hadn't seemed able to grasp the great school
system; it had been really too much for him. On the whole he had
behaved as if there were too much of everything--as if he could
only take in a small part. The part he had chosen was the hotel
system and the river navigation. He had seemed really fascinated
with the hotels; he had a photograph of every one he had visited.
But the river steamers were his principal interest; he wanted to
do nothing but sail on the big boats. They had travelled together
from New York to Milwaukee, stopping at the most interesting
cities on the route; and whenever they started afresh he had
wanted to know if they could go by the steamer. He seemed to have
no idea of geography--had an impression that Baltimore was a
Western city and was perpetually expecting to arrive at the
Mississippi. He appeared never to have heard of any river in
America but the Mississippi and was unprepared to recognise
the existence of the Hudson, though obliged to confess at last
that it was fully equal to the Rhine. They had spent some
pleasant hours in the palace-cars; he was always ordering
ice-cream from the coloured man. He could never get used to that
idea--that you could get ice-cream in the cars. Of course you
couldn't, nor fans, nor candy, nor anything in the English cars!
He found the heat quite overwhelming, and she had told him she
indeed expected it was the biggest he had ever experienced. He
was now in England, hunting--"hunting round" Henrietta called it.
These amusements were those of the American red men; we had left
that behind long ago, the pleasures of the chase. It seemed to be
generally believed in England that we wore tomahawks and
feathers; but such a costume was more in keeping with English
habits. Mr. Bantling would not have time to join her in Italy,
but when she should go to Paris again he expected to come over.
He wanted very much to see Versailles again; he was very fond of
the ancient regime. They didn't agree about that, but that was
what she liked Versailles for, that you could see the ancient
regime had been swept away. There were no dukes and marquises
there now; she remembered on the contrary one day when there were
five American families, walking all round. Mr. Bantling was very
anxious that she should take up the subject of England again, and
he thought she might get on better with it now; England had
changed a good deal within two or three years. He was determined
that if she went there he should go to see his sister, Lady
Pensil, and that this time the invitation should come to her
straight. The mystery about that other one had never been
explained.
Caspar Goodwood came at last to Palazzo Roccanera; he had written
Isabel a note beforehand, to ask leave. This was promptly
granted; she would be at home at six o'clock that afternoon. She
spent the day wondering what he was coming for--what good he
expected to get of it. He had presented himself hitherto as a
person destitute of the faculty of compromise, who would take
what he had asked for or take nothing. Isabel's hospitality,
however, raised no questions, and she found no great difficulty
in appearing happy enough to deceive him. It was her conviction
at least that she deceived him, made him say to himself that he
had been misinformed. But she also saw, so she believed, that he
was not disappointed, as some other men, she was sure, would have
been; he had not come to Rome to look for an opportunity. She
never found out what he had come for; he offered her no
explanation; there could be none but the very simple one that he
wanted to see her. In other words he had come for his amusement.
Isabel followed up this induction with a good deal of eagerness,
and was delighted to have found a formula that would lay the
ghost of this gentleman's ancient grievance. If he had come to
Rome for his amusement this was exactly what she wanted; for if
he cared for amusement he had got over his heartache. If he had
got over his heartache everything was as it should be and her
responsibilities were at an end. It was true that he took his
recreation a little stiffly, but he had never been loose and easy
and she had every reason to believe he was satisfied with what he
saw. Henrietta was not in his confidence, though he was in hers,
and Isabel consequently received no side-light upon his state of
mind. He was open to little conversation on general topics; it
came back to her that she had said of him once, years before,
"Mr. Goodwood speaks a good deal, but he doesn't talk." He spoke
a good deal now, but he talked perhaps as little as ever;
considering, that is, how much there was in Rome to talk about.
His arrival was not calculated to simplify her relations with her
husband, for if Mr. Osmond didn't like her friends Mr. Goodwood
had no claim upon his attention save as having been one of the
first of them. There was nothing for her to say of him but that
he was the very oldest; this rather meagre synthesis exhausted
the facts. She had been obliged to introduce him to Gilbert; it
was impossible she should not ask him to dinner, to her Thursday
evenings, of which she had grown very weary, but to which her
husband still held for the sake not so much of inviting people as
of not inviting them.
To the Thursdays Mr. Goodwood came regularly, solemnly, rather
early; he appeared to regard them with a good deal of gravity.
Isabel every now and then had a moment of anger; there was
something so literal about him; she thought he might know that
she didn't know what to do with him. But she couldn't call him
stupid; he was not that in the least; he was only extraordinarily
honest. To be as honest as that made a man very different from
most people; one had to be almost equally honest with HIM. She
made this latter reflection at the very time she was flattering
herself she had persuaded him that she was the most light-hearted
of women. He never threw any doubt on this point, never asked her
any personal questions. He got on much better with Osmond than
had seemed probable. Osmond had a great dislike to being counted
on; in such a case be had an irresistible need of disappointing
you. It was in virtue of this principle that he gave himself the
entertainment of taking a fancy to a perpendicular Bostonian whom
he bad been depended upon to treat with coldness. He asked Isabel
if Mr. Goodwood also had wanted to marry her, and expressed
surprise at her not having accepted him. It would have been an
excellent thing, like living under some tall belfry which would
strike all the hours and make a queer vibration in the upper air.
He declared he liked to talk with the great Goodwood; it wasn't
easy at first, you had to climb up an interminable steep
staircase up to the top of the tower; but when you got there you
had a big view and felt a little fresh breeze. Osmond, as we
know, had delightful qualities, and he gave Caspar Goodwood the
benefit of them all. Isabel could see that Mr. Goodwood thought
better of her husband than he had ever wished to; he had given
her the impression that morning in Florence of being inaccessible
to a good impression. Gilbert asked him repeatedly to dinner, and
Mr. Goodwood smoked a cigar with him afterwards and even desired
to be shown his collections. Gilbert said to Isabel that he was
very original; he was as strong and of as good a style as an
English portmanteau,--he had plenty of straps and buckles which
would never wear out, and a capital patent lock. Caspar Goodwood
took to riding on the Campagna and devoted much time to this
exercise; it was therefore mainly in the evening that Isabel saw
him. She bethought herself of saying to him one day that if he
were willing he could render her a service. And then she added
smiling:
"I don't know, however, what right I have to ask a service of
you."
"You're the person in the world who has most right," he answered.
"I've given you assurances that I've never given any one else."
The service was that he should go and see her cousin Ralph, who
was ill at the Hotel de Paris, alone, and be as kind to him as
possible. Mr. Goodwood had never seen him, but he would know who
the poor fellow was; if she was not mistaken Ralph had once
invited him to Gardencourt. Caspar remembered the invitation
perfectly, and, though he was not supposed to be a man of
imagination, had enough to put himself in the place of a poor
gentleman who lay dying at a Roman inn. He called at the Hotel de
Paris and, on being shown into the presence of the master of
Gardencourt, found Miss Stackpole sitting beside his sofa. A
singular change had in fact occurred in this lady's relations
with Ralph Touchett. She had not been asked by Isabel to go and
see him, but on hearing that he was too ill to come out had
immediately gone of her own motion. After this she had paid him a
daily visit--always under the conviction that they were great
enemies. "Oh yes, we're intimate enemies," Ralph used to say; and
he accused her freely--as freely as the humour of it would allow
--of coming to worry him to death. In reality they became
excellent friends, Henrietta much wondering that she should never
have liked him before. Ralph liked her exactly as much as he had
always done; he had never doubted for a moment that she was an
excellent fellow. They talked about everything and always
differed; about everything, that is, but Isabel--a topic as to
which Ralph always had a thin forefinger on his lips. Mr.
Bantling on the other hand proved a great resource; Ralph was
capable of discussing Mr. Bantling with Henrietta for hours.
Discussion was stimulated of course by their inevitable
difference of view--Ralph having amused himself with taking the
ground that the genial ex-guardsman was a regular Machiavelli.
Caspar Goodwood could contribute nothing to such a debate; but
after he had been left alone with his host he found there were
various other matters they could take up. It must be admitted
that the lady who had just gone out was not one of these; Caspar
granted all Miss Stackpole's merits in advance, but had no
further remark to make about her. Neither, after the first
allusions, did the two men expatiate upon Mrs. Osmond--a theme in
which Goodwood perceived as many dangers as Ralph. He felt very
sorry for that unclassable personage; he couldn't bear to see a
pleasant man, so pleasant for all his queerness, so beyond
anything to be done. There was always something to be done, for
Goodwood, and he did it in this case by repeating several times
his visit to the Hotel de Paris. It seemed to Isabel that she had
been very clever; she had artfully disposed of the superfluous
Caspar. She had given him an occupation; she had converted him
into a caretaker of Ralph. She had a plan of making him travel
northward with her cousin as soon as the first mild weather
should allow it. Lord Warburton had brought Ralph to Rome and Mr.
Goodwood should take him away. There seemed a happy symmetry in
this, and she was now intensely eager that Ralph should depart.
She had a constant fear he would die there before her eyes and a
horror of the occurrence of this event at an inn, by her door,
which he had so rarely entered. Ralph must sink to his last rest
in his own dear house, in one of those deep, dim chambers of
Gardencourt where the dark ivy would cluster round the edges of
the glimmering window. There seemed to Isabel in these days
something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past was more
perfectly irrecoverable. When she thought of the months she had
spent there the tears rose to her eyes. She flattered herself, as
I say, upon her ingenuity, but she had need of all she could
muster; for several events occurred which seemed to confront and
defy her. The Countess Gemini arrived from Florence--arrived with
her trunks, her dresses, her chatter, her falsehoods, her
frivolity, the strange, the unholy legend of the number of her
lovers. Edward Rosier, who had been away somewhere,--no one, not
even Pansy, knew where,--reappeared in Rome and began to write
her long letters, which she never answered. Madame Merle returned
from Naples and said to her with a strange smile: "What on earth
did you do with Lord Warburton?" As if it were any business of
hers! _
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