Chapter Chapter 39 · Chapter XXXIX

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; he 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?”