The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 2

“I’m glad of that!” cried Isabel gaily. “I wish very much,” she presently added, “that when he comes you’d tell him first of my engagement.”

“Of course I’ll mention it,” said Mrs. Touchett. “I shall say nothing more to you about it, but I give you notice I shall talk to others.”

“That’s as you please. I only meant that it’s rather better the announcement should come from you than from me.”

“I quite agree with you; it’s much more proper!” And on this the aunt and the niece went to breakfast, where Mrs. Touchett, as good as her word, made no allusion to Gilbert Osmond. After an interval of silence, however, she asked her companion from whom she had received a visit an hour before.

“From an old friend—an American gentleman,” Isabel said with a colour in her cheek.

“An American gentleman of course. It’s only an American gentleman who calls at ten o’clock in the morning.”

“It was half-past ten; he was in a great hurry; he goes away this evening.”

“Couldn’t he have come yesterday, at the usual time?”

“He only arrived last night.”

“He spends but twenty-four hours in Florence?” Mrs. Touchett cried. “He’s an American gentleman truly.”

“He is indeed,” said Isabel, thinking with perverse admiration of what Caspar Goodwood had done for her.

Two days afterward Ralph arrived; but though Isabel was sure that Mrs. Touchett had lost no time in imparting to him the great fact, he showed at first no open knowledge of it. Their prompted talk was naturally of his health; Isabel had many questions to ask about Corfu. She had been shocked by his appearance when he came into the room; she had forgotten how ill he looked. In spite of Corfu he looked very ill to-day, and she wondered if he were really worse or if she were simply disaccustomed to living with an invalid. Poor Ralph made no nearer approach to conventional beauty as he advanced in life, and the now apparently complete loss of his health had done little to mitigate the natural oddity of his person. Blighted and battered, but still responsive and still ironic, his face was like a lighted lantern patched with paper and unsteadily held; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek; the exorbitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply. Lean he was altogether, lean and long and loose-jointed; an accidental cohesion of relaxed angles. His brown velvet jacket had become perennial; his hands had fixed themselves in his pockets; he shambled and stumbled and shuffled in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness. It was perhaps this whimsical gait that helped to mark his character more than ever as that of the humorous invalid—the invalid for whom even his own disabilities are part of the general joke. They might well indeed with Ralph have been the chief cause of the want of seriousness marking his view of a world in which the reason for his own continued presence was past finding out. Isabel had grown fond of his ugliness; his awkwardness had become dear to her. They had been sweetened by association; they struck her as the very terms on which it had been given him to be charming. He was so charming that her sense of his being ill had hitherto had a sort of comfort in it; the state of his health had seemed not a limitation, but a kind of intellectual advantage; it absolved him from all professional and official emotions and left him the luxury of being exclusively personal. The personality so resulting was delightful; he had remained proof against the staleness of disease; he had had to consent to be deplorably ill, yet had somehow escaped being formally sick. Such had been the girl’s impression of her cousin; and when she had pitied him it was only on reflection. As she reflected a good deal she had allowed him a certain amount of compassion; but she always had a dread of wasting that essence—a precious article, worth more to the giver than to any one else. Now, however, it took no great sensibility to feel that poor Ralph’s tenure of life was less elastic than it should be. He was a bright, free, generous spirit, he had all the illumination of wisdom and none of its pedantry, and yet he was distressfully dying.

Isabel noted afresh that life was certainly hard for some people, and she felt a delicate glow of shame as she thought how easy it now promised to become for herself. She was prepared to learn that Ralph was not pleased with her engagement; but she was not prepared, in spite of her affection for him, to let this fact spoil the situation. She was not even prepared, or so she thought, to resent his want of sympathy; for it would be his privilege—it would be indeed his natural line—to find fault with any step she might take toward marriage. One’s cousin always pretended to hate one’s husband; that was traditional, classical; it was a part of one’s cousin’s always pretending to adore one. Ralph was nothing if not critical; and though she would certainly, other things being equal, have been as glad to marry to please him as to please any one, it would be absurd to regard as important that her choice should square with his views. What were his views after all? He had pretended to believe she had better have married Lord Warburton; but this was only because she had refused that excellent man. If she had accepted him Ralph would certainly have taken another tone; he always took the opposite. You could criticise any marriage; it was the essence of a marriage to be open to criticism. How well she herself, should she only give her mind to it, might criticise this union of her own! She had other employment, however, and Ralph was welcome to relieve her of the care. Isabel was prepared to be most patient and most indulgent. He must have seen that, and this made it the more odd he should say nothing. After three days had elapsed without his speaking our young woman wearied of waiting; dislike it as he would, he might at least go through the form. We, who know more about poor Ralph than his cousin, may easily believe that during the hours that followed his arrival at Palazzo Crescentini he had privately gone through many forms. His mother had literally greeted him with the great news, which had been even more sensibly chilling than Mrs. Touchett’s maternal kiss. Ralph was shocked and humiliated; his calculations had been false and the person in the world in whom he was most interested was lost. He drifted about the house like a rudderless vessel in a rocky stream, or sat in the garden of the palace on a great cane chair, his long legs extended, his head thrown back and his hat pulled over his eyes. He felt cold about the heart; he had never liked anything less. What could he do, what could he say? If the girl were irreclaimable could he pretend to like it? To attempt to reclaim her was permissible only if the attempt should succeed. To try to persuade her of anything sordid or sinister in the man to whose deep art she had succumbed would be decently discreet only in the event of her being persuaded. Otherwise he should simply have damned himself. It cost him an equal effort to speak his thought and to dissemble; he could neither assent with sincerity nor protest with hope. Meanwhile he knew—or rather he supposed—that the affianced pair were daily renewing their mutual vows. Osmond at this moment showed himself little at Palazzo Crescentini; but Isabel met him every day elsewhere, as she was free to do after their engagement had been made public. She had taken a carriage by the month, so as not to be indebted to her aunt for the means of pursuing a course of which Mrs. Touchett disapproved, and she drove in the morning to the Cascine. This suburban wilderness, during the early hours, was void of all intruders, and our young lady, joined by her lover in its quietest part, strolled with him a while through the grey Italian shade and listened to the nightingales.

CHAPTER XXXIV

One morning, on her return from her drive, some half-hour before luncheon, she quitted her vehicle in the court of the palace and, instead of ascending the great staircase, crossed the court, passed beneath another archway and entered the garden. A sweeter spot at this moment could not have been imagined. The stillness of noontide hung over it, and the warm shade, enclosed and still, made bowers like spacious caves. Ralph was sitting there in the clear gloom, at the base of a statue of Terpsichore—a dancing nymph with taper fingers and inflated draperies in the manner of Bernini; the extreme relaxation of his attitude suggested at first to Isabel that he was asleep. Her light footstep on the grass had not roused him, and before turning away she stood for a moment looking at him. During this instant he opened his eyes; upon which she sat down on a rustic chair that matched with his own. Though in her irritation she had accused him of indifference she was not blind to the fact that he had visibly had something to brood over. But she had explained his air of absence partly by the languor of his increased weakness, partly by worries connected with the property inherited from his father—the fruit of eccentric arrangements of which Mrs. Touchett disapproved and which, as she had told Isabel, now encountered opposition from the other partners in the bank. He ought to have gone to England, his mother said, instead of coming to Florence; he had not been there for months, and took no more interest in the bank than in the state of Patagonia.

“I’m sorry I waked you,” Isabel said; “you look too tired.”

“I feel too tired. But I was not asleep. I was thinking of you.”

“Are you tired of that?”

“Very much so. It leads to nothing. The road’s long and I never arrive.”

“What do you wish to arrive at?” she put to him, closing her parasol.

“At the point of expressing to myself properly what I think of your engagement.”

“Don’t think too much of it,” she lightly returned.

“Do you mean that it’s none of my business?”

“Beyond a certain point, yes.”

“That’s the point I want to fix. I had an idea you may have found me wanting in good manners. I’ve never congratulated you.”

“Of course I’ve noticed that. I wondered why you were silent.”

“There have been a good many reasons. I’ll tell you now,” Ralph said. He pulled off his hat and laid it on the ground; then he sat looking at her. He leaned back under the protection of Bernini, his head against his marble pedestal, his arms dropped on either side of him, his hands laid upon the rests of his wide chair. He looked awkward, uncomfortable; he hesitated long. Isabel said nothing; when people were embarrassed she was usually sorry for them, but she was determined not to help Ralph to utter a word that should not be to the honour of her high decision. “I think I’ve hardly got over my surprise,” he went on at last. “You were the last person I expected to see caught.”

“I don’t know why you call it caught.”

“Because you’re going to be put into a cage.”

“If I like my cage, that needn’t trouble you,” she answered.

“That’s what I wonder at; that’s what I’ve been thinking of.”

“If you’ve been thinking you may imagine how I’ve thought! I’m satisfied that I’m doing well.”

“You must have changed immensely. A year ago you valued your liberty beyond everything. You wanted only to see life.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Isabel. “It doesn’t look to me now, I admit, such an inviting expanse.”

“I don’t pretend it is; only I had an idea that you took a genial view of it and wanted to survey the whole field.”

“I’ve seen that one can’t do anything so general. One must choose a corner and cultivate that.”

“That’s what I think. And one must choose as good a corner as possible. I had no idea, all winter, while I read your delightful letters, that you were choosing. You said nothing about it, and your silence put me off my guard.”

“It was not a matter I was likely to write to you about. Besides, I knew nothing of the future. It has all come lately. If you had been on your guard, however,” Isabel asked, “what would you have done?”

“I should have said ‘Wait a little longer.’”

“Wait for what?”

“Well, for a little more light,” said Ralph with rather an absurd smile, while his hands found their way into his pockets.

“Where should my light have come from? From you?”

“I might have struck a spark or two.”

Isabel had drawn off her gloves; she smoothed them out as they lay upon her knee. The mildness of this movement was accidental, for her expression was not conciliatory. “You’re beating about the bush, Ralph. You wish to say you don’t like Mr. Osmond, and yet you’re afraid.”

“Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike? I’m willing to wound him, yes—but not to wound you. I’m afraid of you, not of him. If you marry him it won’t be a fortunate way for me to have spoken.”

“If I marry him! Have you had any expectation of dissuading me?”

“Of course that seems to you too fatuous.”

“No,” said Isabel after a little; “it seems to me too touching.”

“That’s the same thing. It makes me so ridiculous that you pity me.”

She stroked out her long gloves again. “I know you’ve a great affection for me. I can’t get rid of that.”