第 三十一 章 · Chapter XXXI

Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval

sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during this

interval that we are closely concerned with her; our attention is

engaged again on a certain day in the late spring-time, shortly after

her return to Palazzo Crescentini and a year from the date of the

incidents just narrated. She was alone on this occasion, in one of the

smaller of the numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses,

and there was that in her expression and attitude which would have

suggested that she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open,

and though its green shutters were partly drawn the bright air of the

garden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with

warmth and perfume. Our young woman stood near it for some time, her

hands clasped behind her; she gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest.

Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle. Yet it could not

be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should

pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through

the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wished

rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge

by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave

she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of

the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged,

she would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and

was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the

frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measure

of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before. She

flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned a great deal

more of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected. If

her thoughts just now had inclined themselves to retrospect, instead

of fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would have

evoked a multitude of interesting pictures. These pictures would have

been both landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have

been the more numerous. With several of the images that might have been

projected on such a field we are already acquainted. There would be for

instance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine’s sister and Edmund Ludlow’s

wife, who had come out from New York to spend five months with her

relative. She had left her husband behind her, but had brought

her children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and

tenderness the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had

been able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossing

the ocean with extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladies

in Paris before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet,

even from the American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age; so

that while her sister was with her Isabel had confined her movements to

a narrow circle. Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland in

the month of July, and they had spent a summer of fine weather in an

Alpine valley where the flowers were thick in the meadows and the shade

of great chestnuts made a resting-place for such upward wanderings as

might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. They had

afterwards reached the French capital, which was worshipped, and with

costly ceremonies, by Lily, but thought of as noisily vacant by Isabel,

who in these days made use of her memory of Rome as she might have done,

in a hot and crowded room, of a phial of something pungent hidden in her

handkerchief.

Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts and

wonderments not allayed at that altar; and after her husband had joined

her found further chagrin in his failure to throw himself into these

speculations. They all had Isabel for subject; but Edmund Ludlow, as

he had always done before, declined to be surprised, or distressed, or

mystified, or elated, at anything his sister-in-law might have done

or have failed to do. Mrs. Ludlow’s mental motions were sufficiently

various. At one moment she thought it would be so natural for that young

woman to come home and take a house in New York--the Rossiters’, for

instance, which had an elegant conservatory and was just round the

corner from her own; at another she couldn’t conceal her surprise at the

girl’s not marrying some member of one of the great aristocracies. On

the whole, as I have said, she had fallen from high communion with the

probabilities. She had taken more satisfaction in Isabel’s accession of

fortune than if the money had been left to herself; it had seemed to her

to offer just the proper setting for her sister’s slightly meagre, but

scarce the less eminent figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than

Lily had thought likely--development, to Lily’s understanding, being

somehow mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties.

Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides; but she

appeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which Mrs.

Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily’s conception of such

achievements was extremely vague; but this was exactly what she had

expected of Isabel--to give it form and body. Isabel could have done

as well as she had done in New York; and Mrs. Ludlow appealed to her

husband to know whether there was any privilege she enjoyed in Europe

which the society of that city might not offer her. We know ourselves

that Isabel had made conquests--whether inferior or not to those she

might have effected in her native land it would be a delicate matter to

decide; and it is not altogether with a feeling of complacency that

I again mention that she had not rendered these honourable victories

public. She had not told her sister the history of Lord Warburton, nor

had she given her a hint of Mr. Osmond’s state of mind; and she had had

no better reason for her silence than that she didn’t wish to speak.

It was more romantic to say nothing, and, drinking deep, in secret, of

romance, she was as little disposed to ask poor Lily’s advice as she

would have been to close that rare volume forever. But Lily knew nothing

of these discriminations, and could only pronounce her sister’s career

a strange anti-climax--an impression confirmed by the fact that Isabel’s

silence about Mr. Osmond, for instance, was in direct proportion to the

frequency with which he occupied her thoughts. As this happened very

often it sometimes appeared to Mrs. Ludlow that she had lost her

courage. So uncanny a result of so exhilarating an incident as

inheriting a fortune was of course perplexing to the cheerful Lily; it

added to her general sense that Isabel was not at all like other people.

Our young lady’s courage, however, might have been taken as reaching

its height after her relations had gone home. She could imagine braver

things than spending the winter in Paris--Paris had sides by which it

so resembled New York, Paris was like smart, neat prose--and her close

correspondence with Madame Merle did much to stimulate such flights. She

had never had a keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness and

wantonness of liberty, than when she turned away from the platform

at the Euston Station on one of the last days of November, after the

departure of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband and her

children to their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for her to regale;

she was very conscious of that; she was very observant, as we know, of

what was good for her, and her effort was constantly to find something

that was good enough. To profit by the present advantage till the latest

moment she had made the journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers.

She would have accompanied them to Liverpool as well, only Edmund Ludlow

had asked her, as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety and

she asked such impossible questions. Isabel watched the train move away;

she kissed her hand to the elder of her small nephews, a demonstrative

child who leaned dangerously far out of the window of the carriage and

made separation an occasion of violent hilarity, and then she walked

back into the foggy London street. The world lay before her--she could

do whatever she chose. There was a deep thrill in it all, but for the

present her choice was tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back

from Euston Square to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoon

had already closed in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air, looked

weak and red; our heroine was unattended and Euston Square was a long

way from Piccadilly. But Isabel performed the journey with a positive

enjoyment of its dangers and lost her way almost on purpose, in order

to get more sensations, so that she was disappointed when an obliging

policeman easily set her right again. She was so fond of the spectacle

of human life that she enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in the

London streets--the moving crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops,

the flaring stalls, the dark, shining dampness of everything. That

evening, at her hotel, she wrote to Madame Merle that she should start

in a day or two for Rome. She made her way down to Rome without touching

at Florence--having gone first to Venice and then proceeded southward by

Ancona. She accomplished this journey without other assistance than that

of her servant, for her natural protectors were not now on the ground.

Ralph Touchett was spending the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, in

the September previous, had been recalled to America by a telegram from

the _Interviewer_. This journal offered its brilliant correspondent a

fresher field for her genius than the mouldering cities of Europe, and

Henrietta was cheered on her way by a promise from Mr. Bantling that

he would soon come over to see her. Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett to

apologise for not presenting herself just yet in Florence, and her aunt

replied characteristically enough. Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated,

were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt

in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one

“would” have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the

idea of a future life or of the origin of things. Her letter was frank,

but (a rare case with Mrs. Touchett) not so frank as it pretended. She

easily forgave her niece for not stopping at Florence, because she

took it for a sign that Gilbert Osmond was less in question there than

formerly. She watched of course to see if he would now find a pretext

for going to Rome, and derived some comfort from learning that he had

not been guilty of an absence. Isabel, on her side, had not been a

fortnight in Rome before she proposed to Madame Merle that they should

make a little pilgrimage to the East. Madame Merle remarked that her

friend was restless, but she added that she herself had always been

consumed with the desire to visit Athens and Constantinople. The two

ladies accordingly embarked on this expedition, and spent three months

in Greece, in Turkey, in Egypt. Isabel found much to interest her in

these countries, though Madame Merle continued to remark that even among

the most classic sites, the scenes most calculated to suggest repose

and reflexion, a certain incoherence prevailed in her. Isabel travelled

rapidly and recklessly; she was like a thirsty person draining cup

after cup. Madame Merle meanwhile, as lady-in-waiting to a princess

circulating _incognita_, panted a little in her rear. It was on Isabel’s

invitation she had come, and she imparted all due dignity to the girl’s

uncountenanced state. She played her part with the tact that might have

been expected of her, effacing herself and accepting the position of a

companion whose expenses were profusely paid. The situation, however,

had no hardships, and people who met this reserved though striking

pair on their travels would not have been able to tell you which

was patroness and which client. To say that Madame Merle improved on

acquaintance states meagrely the impression she made on her friend,

who had found her from the first so ample and so easy. At the end of an

intimacy of three months Isabel felt she knew her better; her character

had revealed itself, and the admirable woman had also at last redeemed

her promise of relating her history from her own point of view--a

consummation the more desirable as Isabel had already heard it related

from the point of view of others. This history was so sad a one (in so

far as it concerned the late M. Merle, a positive adventurer, she might

say, though originally so plausible, who had taken advantage, years

before, of her youth and of an inexperience in which doubtless those who

knew her only now would find it difficult to believe); it abounded so in

startling and lamentable incidents that her companion wondered a person

so _eprouvée_ could have kept so much of her freshness, her interest in

life. Into this freshness of Madame Merle’s she obtained a considerable

insight; she seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical,

carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or blanketed

and bridled like the “favourite” of the jockey. She liked her as much

as ever, but there was a corner of the curtain that never was lifted;

it was as if she had remained after all something of a public performer,

condemned to emerge only in character and in costume. She had once

said that she came from a distance, that she belonged to the “old, old”

world, and Isabel never lost the impression that she was the product of

a different moral or social clime from her own, that she had grown up

under other stars.

She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality. Of course

the morality of civilised persons has always much in common; but our

young woman had a sense in her of values gone wrong or, as they said at

the shops, marked down. She considered, with the presumption of youth,

that a morality differing from her own must be inferior to it; and this

conviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an

occasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a person who had

raised delicate kindness to an art and whose pride was too high for

the narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives might,

in certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom in

decadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had

not even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain;

and there were evidently things in the world of which it was not

advantageous to hear. She had once or twice had a positive scare; since

it so affected her to have to exclaim, of her friend, “Heaven forgive

her, she doesn’t understand me!” Absurd as it may seem this discovery

operated as a shock, left her with a vague dismay in which there was

even an element of foreboding. The dismay of course subsided, in the

light of some sudden proof of Madame Merle’s remarkable intelligence;

but it stood for a high-water-mark in the ebb and flow of confidence.

Madame Merle had once declared her belief that when a friendship ceases

to grow it immediately begins to decline--there being no point of

equilibrium between liking more and liking less. A stationary affection,

in other words, was impossible--it must move one way or the other.

However that might be, the girl had in these days a thousand uses for

her sense of the romantic, which was more active than it had ever been.

I do not allude to the impulse it received as she gazed at the Pyramids

in the course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among the

broken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her eyes upon the point

designated to her as the Strait of Salamis; deep and memorable as these

emotions had remained. She came back by the last of March from Egypt

and Greece and made another stay in Rome. A few days after her arrival

Gilbert Osmond descended from Florence and remained three weeks, during

which the fact of her being with his old friend Madame Merle, in whose

house she had gone to lodge, made it virtually inevitable that he

should see her every day. When the last of April came she wrote to Mrs.

Touchett that she should now rejoice to accept an invitation given long

before, and went to pay a visit at Palazzo Crescentini, Madame Merle on

this occasion remaining in Rome. She found her aunt alone; her cousin

was still at Corfu. Ralph, however, was expected in Florence from day

to day, and Isabel, who had not seen him for upwards of a year, was

prepared to give him the most affectionate welcome.