The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 1

“Not too much so, however,” Madame Merle answered. She talked with her usual smile, leaning back in her chair and looking round the room. “You’ve made a very good impression, and I’ve seen for myself that you’ve received one. You’ve not come to Mrs. Touchett’s seven times to oblige me.”

“The girl’s not disagreeable,” Osmond quietly conceded.

Madame Merle dropped her eye on him a moment, during which her lips closed with a certain firmness. “Is that all you can find to say about that fine creature?”

“All? Isn’t it enough? Of how many people have you heard me say more?”

She made no answer to this, but still presented her talkative grace to the room. “You’re unfathomable,” she murmured at last. “I’m frightened at the abyss into which I shall have cast her.”

He took it almost gaily. “You can’t draw back—you’ve gone too far.”

“Very good; but you must do the rest yourself.”

“I shall do it,” said Gilbert Osmond.

Madame Merle remained silent and he changed his place again; but when she rose to go he also took leave. Mrs. Touchett’s victoria was awaiting her guest in the court, and after he had helped his friend into it he stood there detaining her. “You’re very indiscreet,” she said rather wearily; “you shouldn’t have moved when I did.”

He had taken off his hat; he passed his hand over his forehead. “I always forget; I’m out of the habit.”

“You’re quite unfathomable,” she repeated, glancing up at the windows of the house, a modern structure in the new part of the town.

He paid no heed to this remark, but spoke in his own sense. “She’s really very charming. I’ve scarcely known any one more graceful.”

“It does me good to hear you say that. The better you like her the better for me.”

“I like her very much. She’s all you described her, and into the bargain capable, I feel, of great devotion. She has only one fault.”

“What’s that?”

“Too many ideas.”

“I warned you she was clever.”

“Fortunately they’re very bad ones,” said Osmond.

“Why is that fortunate?”

“Dame, if they must be sacrificed!”

Madame Merle leaned back, looking straight before her; then she spoke to the coachman. But her friend again detained her. “If I go to Rome what shall I do with Pansy?”

“I’ll go and see her,” said Madame Merle.

CHAPTER XXVII

I may not attempt to report in its fulness our young woman’s response to the deep appeal of Rome, to analyse her feelings as she trod the pavement of the Forum or to number her pulsations as she crossed the threshold of Saint Peter’s. It is enough to say that her impression was such as might have been expected of a person of her freshness and her eagerness. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things strongly moved her, but moved her all inwardly. It seemed to her companions that she talked less than usual, and Ralph Touchett, when he appeared to be looking listlessly and awkwardly over her head, was really dropping on her an intensity of observation. By her own measure she was very happy; she would even have been willing to take these hours for the happiest she was ever to know. The sense of the terrible human past was heavy to her, but that of something altogether contemporary would suddenly give it wings that it could wave in the blue. Her consciousness was so mixed that she scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her, and she went about in a repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in her Murray. Rome, as Ralph said, confessed to the psychological moment. The herd of reechoing tourists had departed and most of the solemn places had relapsed into solemnity. The sky was a blaze of blue, and the plash of the fountains in their mossy niches had lost its chill and doubled its music. On the corners of the warm, bright streets one stumbled on bundles of flowers. Our friends had gone one afternoon—it was the third of their stay—to look at the latest excavations in the Forum, these labours having been for some time previous largely extended. They had descended from the modern street to the level of the Sacred Way, along which they wandered with a reverence of step which was not the same on the part of each. Henrietta Stackpole was struck with the fact that ancient Rome had been paved a good deal like New York, and even found an analogy between the deep chariot-ruts traceable in the antique street and the overjangled iron grooves which express the intensity of American life. The sun had begun to sink, the air was a golden haze, and the long shadows of broken column and vague pedestal leaned across the field of ruin. Henrietta wandered away with Mr. Bantling, whom it was apparently delightful to her to hear speak of Julius Caesar as a “cheeky old boy,” and Ralph addressed such elucidations as he was prepared to offer to the attentive ear of our heroine. One of the humble archeologists who hover about the place had put himself at the disposal of the two, and repeated his lesson with a fluency which the decline of the season had done nothing to impair. A process of digging was on view in a remote corner of the Forum, and he presently remarked that if it should please the _signori_ to go and watch it a little they might see something of interest. The proposal commended itself more to Ralph than to Isabel, weary with much wandering; so that she admonished her companion to satisfy his curiosity while she patiently awaited his return. The hour and the place were much to her taste—she should enjoy being briefly alone. Ralph accordingly went off with the cicerone while Isabel sat down on a prostrate column near the foundations of the Capitol. She wanted a short solitude, but she was not long to enjoy it. Keen as was her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered about her and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while on these things, had wandered, by a concatenation of stages it might require some subtlety to trace, to regions and objects charged with a more active appeal. From the Roman past to Isabel Archer’s future was a long stride, but her imagination had taken it in a single flight and now hovered in slow circles over the nearer and richer field. She was so absorbed in her thoughts, as she bent her eyes upon a row of cracked but not dislocated slabs covering the ground at her feet, that she had not heard the sound of approaching footsteps before a shadow was thrown across the line of her vision. She looked up and saw a gentleman—a gentleman who was not Ralph come back to say that the excavations were a bore. This personage was startled as she was startled; he stood there baring his head to her perceptibly pale surprise.

“Lord Warburton!” Isabel exclaimed as she rose.

“I had no idea it was you. I turned that corner and came upon you.”

She looked about her to explain. “I’m alone, but my companions have just left me. My cousin’s gone to look at the work over there.”

“Ah yes; I see.” And Lord Warburton’s eyes wandered vaguely in the direction she had indicated. He stood firmly before her now; he had recovered his balance and seemed to wish to show it, though very kindly. “Don’t let me disturb you,” he went on, looking at her dejected pillar. “I’m afraid you’re tired.”

“Yes, I’m rather tired.” She hesitated a moment, but sat down again. “Don’t let me interrupt you,” she added.

“Oh dear, I’m quite alone, I’ve nothing on earth to do. I had no idea you were in Rome. I’ve just come from the East. I’m only passing through.”

“You’ve been making a long journey,” said Isabel, who had learned from Ralph that Lord Warburton was absent from England.

“Yes, I came abroad for six months—soon after I saw you last. I’ve been in Turkey and Asia Minor; I came the other day from Athens.” He managed not to be awkward, but he wasn’t easy, and after a longer look at the girl he came down to nature. “Do you wish me to leave you, or will you let me stay a little?”

She took it all humanely. “I don’t wish you to leave me, Lord Warburton; I’m very glad to see you.”

“Thank you for saying that. May I sit down?”

The fluted shaft on which she had taken her seat would have afforded a resting-place to several persons, and there was plenty of room even for a highly-developed Englishman. This fine specimen of that great class seated himself near our young lady, and in the course of five minutes he had asked her several questions, taken rather at random and to which, as he put some of them twice over, he apparently somewhat missed catching the answer; had given her too some information about himself which was not wasted upon her calmer feminine sense. He repeated more than once that he had not expected to meet her, and it was evident that the encounter touched him in a way that would have made preparation advisable. He began abruptly to pass from the impunity of things to their solemnity, and from their being delightful to their being impossible. He was splendidly sunburnt; even his multitudinous beard had been burnished by the fire of Asia. He was dressed in the loose-fitting, heterogeneous garments in which the English traveller in foreign lands is wont to consult his comfort and affirm his nationality; and with his pleasant steady eyes, his bronzed complexion, fresh beneath its seasoning, his manly figure, his minimising manner and his general air of being a gentleman and an explorer, he was such a representative of the British race as need not in any clime have been disavowed by those who have a kindness for it. Isabel noted these things and was glad she had always liked him. He had kept, evidently in spite of shocks, every one of his merits—properties these partaking of the essence of great decent houses, as one might put it; resembling their innermost fixtures and ornaments, not subject to vulgar shifting and removable only by some whole break-up. They talked of the matters naturally in order; her uncle’s death, Ralph’s state of health, the way she had passed her winter, her visit to Rome, her return to Florence, her plans for the summer, the hotel she was staying at; and then of Lord Warburton’s own adventures, movements, intentions, impressions and present domicile. At last there was a silence, and it said so much more than either had said that it scarce needed his final words. “I’ve written to you several times.”

“Written to me? I’ve never had your letters.”

“I never sent them. I burned them up.”

“Ah,” laughed Isabel, “it was better that you should do that than I!”

“I thought you wouldn’t care for them,” he went on with a simplicity that touched her. “It seemed to me that after all I had no right to trouble you with letters.”

“I should have been very glad to have news of you. You know how I hoped that—that—” But she stopped; there would be such a flatness in the utterance of her thought.

“I know what you’re going to say. You hoped we should always remain good friends.” This formula, as Lord Warburton uttered it, was certainly flat enough; but then he was interested in making it appear so.

She found herself reduced simply to “Please don’t talk of all that”; a speech which hardly struck her as improvement on the other.

“It’s a small consolation to allow me!” her companion exclaimed with force.

“I can’t pretend to console you,” said the girl, who, all still as she sat there, threw herself back with a sort of inward triumph on the answer that had satisfied him so little six months before. He was pleasant, he was powerful, he was gallant; there was no better man than he. But her answer remained.

“It’s very well you don’t try to console me; it wouldn’t be in your power,” she heard him say through the medium of her strange elation.

“I hoped we should meet again, because I had no fear you would attempt to make me feel I had wronged you. But when you do that—the pain’s greater than the pleasure.” And she got up with a small conscious majesty, looking for her companions.

“I don’t want to make you feel that; of course I can’t say that. I only just want you to know one or two things—in fairness to myself, as it were. I won’t return to the subject again. I felt very strongly what I expressed to you last year; I couldn’t think of anything else. I tried to forget—energetically, systematically. I tried to take an interest in somebody else. I tell you this because I want you to know I did my duty. I didn’t succeed. It was for the same purpose I went abroad—as far away as possible. They say travelling distracts the mind, but it didn’t distract mine. I’ve thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I’m exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true. This instant at which I speak to you shows me again exactly how, to my great misfortune, you just insuperably charm me. There—I can’t say less. I don’t mean, however, to insist; it’s only for a moment. I may add that when I came upon you a few minutes since, without the smallest idea of seeing you, I was, upon my honour, in the very act of wishing I knew where you were.” He had recovered his self-control, and while he spoke it became complete. He might have been addressing a small committee—making all quietly and clearly a statement of importance; aided by an occasional look at a paper of notes concealed in his hat, which he had not again put on. And the committee, assuredly, would have felt the point proved.

“I’ve often thought of you, Lord Warburton,” Isabel answered. “You may be sure I shall always do that.” And she added in a tone of which she tried to keep up the kindness and keep down the meaning: “There’s no harm in that on either side.”

They walked along together, and she was prompt to ask about his sisters and request him to let them know she had done so. He made for the moment no further reference to their great question, but dipped again into shallower and safer waters. But he wished to know when she was to leave Rome, and on her mentioning the limit of her stay declared he was glad it was still so distant.

“Why do you say that if you yourself are only passing through?” she enquired with some anxiety.