Chapter Chapter 47 · Chapter XLVII

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 he 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

he 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 had 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 Hôtel 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

Hôtel 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 Hôtel 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!