第 十九 章 · Chapter XIX

As Mrs. Touchett had foretold, Isabel and Madame Merle were thrown

much together during the illness of their host, so that if they had

not become intimate it would have been almost a breach of good manners.

Their manners were of the best, but in addition to this they happened

to please each other. It is perhaps too much to say that they swore

an eternal friendship, but tacitly at least they called the future to

witness. Isabel did so with a perfectly good conscience, though she

would have hesitated to admit she was intimate with her new friend in

the high sense she privately attached to this term. She often wondered

indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with any one.

She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments,

which it failed to seem to her in this case--it had not seemed to her

in other cases--that the actual completely expressed it. But she often

reminded herself that there were essential reasons why one’s ideal

could never become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see--a

matter of faith, not of experience. Experience, however, might supply

us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was

to make the best of these. Certainly, on the whole, Isabel had never

encountered a more agreeable and interesting figure than Madame Merle;

she had never met a person having less of that fault which is the

principal obstacle to friendship--the air of reproducing the more

tiresome, the stale, the too-familiar parts of one’s own character.

The gates of the girl’s confidence were opened wider than they had ever

been; she said things to this amiable auditress that she had not yet

said to any one. Sometimes she took alarm at her candour: it was as

if she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of

jewels. These spiritual gems were the only ones of any magnitude that

Isabel possessed, but there was all the greater reason for their being

carefully guarded. Afterwards, however, she always remembered that one

should never regret a generous error and that if Madame Merle had not

the merits she attributed to her, so much the worse for Madame Merle.

There was no doubt she had great merits--she was charming, sympathetic,

intelligent, cultivated. More than this (for it had not been Isabel’s

ill-fortune to go through life without meeting in her own sex several

persons of whom no less could fairly be said), she was rare, superior

and preeminent. There are many amiable people in the world, and Madame

Merle was far from being vulgarly good-natured and restlessly witty. She

knew how to think--an accomplishment rare in women; and she had thought

to very good purpose. Of course, too, she knew how to feel; Isabel

couldn’t have spent a week with her without being sure of that. This was

indeed Madame Merle’s great talent, her most perfect gift. Life had told

upon her; she had felt it strongly, and it was part of the satisfaction

to be taken in her society that when the girl talked of what she was

pleased to call serious matters this lady understood her so easily and

quickly. Emotion, it is true, had become with her rather historic; she

made no secret of the fact that the fount of passion, thanks to having

been rather violently tapped at one period, didn’t flow quite so

freely as of yore. She proposed moreover, as well as expected, to cease

feeling; she freely admitted that of old she had been a little mad, and

now she pretended to be perfectly sane.

“I judge more than I used to,” she said to Isabel, “but it seems to me

one has earned the right. One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that

we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

I’m sorry for you; it will be a long time before you’re forty. But every

gain’s a loss of some kind; I often think that after forty one can’t

really feel. The freshness, the quickness have certainly gone. You’ll

keep them longer than most people; it will be a great satisfaction to me

to see you some years hence. I want to see what life makes of you. One

thing’s certain--it can’t spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but

I defy it to break you up.”

Isabel received this assurance as a young soldier, still panting from

a slight skirmish in which he has come off with honour, might receive a

pat on the shoulder from his colonel. Like such a recognition of merit

it seemed to come with authority. How could the lightest word do less

on the part of a person who was prepared to say, of almost everything

Isabel told her, “Oh, I’ve been in that, my dear; it passes, like

everything else.” On many of her interlocutors Madame Merle might have

produced an irritating effect; it was disconcertingly difficult to

surprise her. But Isabel, though by no means incapable of desiring to

be effective, had not at present this impulse. She was too sincere, too

interested in her judicious companion. And then moreover Madame Merle

never said such things in the tone of triumph or of boastfulness; they

dropped from her like cold confessions.

A period of bad weather had settled upon Gardencourt; the days grew

shorter and there was an end to the pretty tea-parties on the lawn. But

our young woman had long indoor conversations with her fellow visitor,

and in spite of the rain the two ladies often sallied forth for a walk,

equipped with the defensive apparatus which the English climate and

the English genius have between them brought to such perfection. Madame

Merle liked almost everything, including the English rain. “There’s

always a little of it and never too much at once,” she said; “and it

never wets you and it always smells good.” She declared that in England

the pleasures of smell were great--that in this inimitable island there

was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it

might sound, was the national aroma, and was most agreeable to the

nostril; and she used to lift the sleeve of her British overcoat and

bury her nose in it, inhaling the clear, fine scent of the wool. Poor

Ralph Touchett, as soon as the autumn had begun to define itself, became

almost a prisoner; in bad weather he was unable to step out of the

house, and he used sometimes to stand at one of the windows with his

hands in his pockets and, from a countenance half-rueful, half-critical,

watch Isabel and Madame Merle as they walked down the avenue under a

pair of umbrellas. The roads about Gardencourt were so firm, even in the

worst weather, that the two ladies always came back with a healthy glow

in their cheeks, looking at the soles of their neat, stout boots and

declaring that their walk had done them inexpressible good. Before

luncheon, always, Madame Merle was engaged; Isabel admired and envied

her rigid possession of her morning. Our heroine had always passed for a

person of resources and had taken a certain pride in being one; but she

wandered, as by the wrong side of the wall of a private garden, round

the enclosed talents, accomplishments, aptitudes of Madame Merle. She

found herself desiring to emulate them, and in twenty such ways this

lady presented herself as a model. “I should like awfully to be so!”

Isabel secretly exclaimed, more than once, as one after another of her

friend’s fine aspects caught the light, and before long she knew that

she had learned a lesson from a high authority. It took no great time

indeed for her to feel herself, as the phrase is, under an influence.

“What’s the harm,” she wondered, “so long as it’s a good one? The more

one’s under a good influence the better. The only thing is to see our

steps as we take them--to understand them as we go. That, no doubt, I

shall always do. I needn’t be afraid of becoming too pliable; isn’t it

my fault that I’m not pliable enough?” It is said that imitation is the

sincerest flattery; and if Isabel was sometimes moved to gape at her

friend aspiringly and despairingly it was not so much because she

desired herself to shine as because she wished to hold up the lamp for

Madame Merle. She liked her extremely, but was even more dazzled than

attracted. She sometimes asked herself what Henrietta Stackpole would

say to her thinking so much of this perverted product of their common

soil, and had a conviction that it would be severely judged. Henrietta

would not at all subscribe to Madame Merle; for reasons she could not

have defined this truth came home to the girl. On the other hand she

was equally sure that, should the occasion offer, her new friend would

strike off some happy view of her old: Madame Merle was too humorous,

too observant, not to do justice to Henrietta, and on becoming

acquainted with her would probably give the measure of a tact which

Miss Stackpole couldn’t hope to emulate. She appeared to have in her

experience a touchstone for everything, and somewhere in the capacious

pocket of her genial memory she would find the key to Henrietta’s value.

“That’s the great thing,” Isabel solemnly pondered; “that’s the supreme

good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than

they are for appreciating you.” And she added that such, when one

considered it, was simply the essence of the aristocratic situation.

In this light, if in none other, one should aim at the aristocratic

situation.

I may not count over all the links in the chain which led Isabel to

think of Madame Merle’s situation as aristocratic--a view of it never

expressed in any reference made to it by that lady herself. She had

known great things and great people, but she had never played a great

part. She was one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born

to honours; she knew the world too well to nourish fatuous illusions

on the article of her own place in it. She had encountered many of the

fortunate few and was perfectly aware of those points at which their

fortune differed from hers. But if by her informed measure she was no

figure for a high scene, she had yet to Isabel’s imagination a sort of

greatness. To be so cultivated and civilised, so wise and so easy,

and still make so light of it--that was really to be a great lady,

especially when one so carried and presented one’s self. It was as if

somehow she had all society under contribution, and all the arts and

graces it practised--or was the effect rather that of charming uses

found for her, even from a distance, subtle service rendered by her to

a clamorous world wherever she might be? After breakfast she wrote a

succession of letters, as those arriving for her appeared innumerable:

her correspondence was a source of surprise to Isabel when they

sometimes walked together to the village post-office to deposit Madame

Merle’s offering to the mail. She knew more people, as she told Isabel,

than she knew what to do with, and something was always turning up to be

written about. Of painting she was devotedly fond, and made no more of

brushing in a sketch than of pulling off her gloves. At Gardencourt she

was perpetually taking advantage of an hour’s sunshine to go out with a

camp-stool and a box of water-colours. That she was a brave musician we

have already perceived, and it was evidence of the fact that when she

seated herself at the piano, as she always did in the evening, her

listeners resigned themselves without a murmur to losing the grace

of her talk. Isabel, since she had known her, felt ashamed of her own

facility, which she now looked upon as basely inferior; and indeed,

though she had been thought rather a prodigy at home, the loss to

society when, in taking her place upon the music-stool, she turned her

back to the room, was usually deemed greater than the gain. When Madame

Merle was neither writing, nor painting, nor touching the piano, she

was usually employed upon wonderful tasks of rich embroidery, cushions,

curtains, decorations for the chimneypiece; an art in which her bold,

free invention was as noted as the agility of her needle. She was never

idle, for when engaged in none of the ways I have mentioned she was

either reading (she appeared to Isabel to read “everything important”),

or walking out, or playing patience with the cards, or talking with her

fellow inmates. And with all this she had always the social quality, was

never rudely absent and yet never too seated. She laid down her pastimes

as easily as she took them up; she worked and talked at the same time,

and appeared to impute scant worth to anything she did. She gave away

her sketches and tapestries; she rose from the piano or remained

there, according to the convenience of her auditors, which she always

unerringly divined. She was in short the most comfortable, profitable,

amenable person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault it was that

she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was either

affected or pretentious, since from these vulgar vices no woman could

have been more exempt, but that her nature had been too much overlaid by

custom and her angles too much rubbed away. She had become too flexible,

too useful, was too ripe and too final. She was in a word too perfectly

the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended

to be; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness

which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons

in the ages before country-house life was the fashion. Isabel found it

difficult to think of her in any detachment or privacy, she existed only

in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals. One might

wonder what commerce she could possibly hold with her own spirit.

One always ended, however, by feeling that a charming surface doesn’t

necessarily prove one superficial; this was an illusion in which, in

one’s youth, one had but just escaped being nourished. Madame Merle was

not superficial--not she. She was deep, and her nature spoke none the

less in her behaviour because it spoke a conventional tongue. “What’s

language at all but a convention?” said Isabel. “She has the good

taste not to pretend, like some people I’ve met, to express herself by

original signs.”

“I’m afraid you’ve suffered much,” she once found occasion to say to her

friend in response to some allusion that had appeared to reach far.

“What makes you think that?” Madame Merle asked with the amused smile

of a person seated at a game of guesses. “I hope I haven’t too much the

droop of the misunderstood.”

“No; but you sometimes say things that I think people who have always

been happy wouldn’t have found out.”

“I haven’t always been happy,” said Madame Merle, smiling still, but

with a mock gravity, as if she were telling a child a secret. “Such a

wonderful thing!”

But Isabel rose to the irony. “A great many people give me the

impression of never having for a moment felt anything.”

“It’s very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain.

But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the

hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I

flatter myself that I’m rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth

I’ve been shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service

yet, because I’ve been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the

cupboard--the quiet, dusky cupboard where there’s an odour of stale

spices--as much as I can. But when I’ve to come out and into a strong

light--then, my dear, I’m a horror!”

I know not whether it was on this occasion or on some other that the

conversation had taken the turn I have just indicated she said to Isabel

that she would some day a tale unfold. Isabel assured her she should

delight to listen to one, and reminded her more than once of this

engagement. Madame Merle, however, begged repeatedly for a respite, and

at last frankly told her young companion that they must wait till they

knew each other better. This would be sure to happen, a long friendship

so visibly lay before them. Isabel assented, but at the same time

enquired if she mightn’t be trusted--if she appeared capable of a

betrayal of confidence.

“It’s not that I’m afraid of your repeating what I say,” her fellow

visitor answered; “I’m afraid, on the contrary, of your taking it too

much to yourself. You’d judge me too harshly; you’re of the cruel age.”

She preferred for the present to talk to Isabel of Isabel, and exhibited

the greatest interest in our heroine’s history, sentiments, opinions,

prospects. She made her chatter and listened to her chatter with

infinite good nature. This flattered and quickened the girl, who was

struck with all the distinguished people her friend had known and with

her having lived, as Mrs. Touchett said, in the best company in Europe.

Isabel thought the better of herself for enjoying the favour of a person

who had so large a field of comparison; and it was perhaps partly to

gratify the sense of profiting by comparison that she often appealed to

these stores of reminiscence. Madame Merle had been a dweller in many

lands and had social ties in a dozen different countries. “I don’t

pretend to be educated,” she would say, “but I think I know my Europe;”

and she spoke one day of going to Sweden to stay with an old friend,

and another of proceeding to Malta to follow up a new acquaintance. With

England, where she had often dwelt, she was thoroughly familiar, and

for Isabel’s benefit threw a great deal of light upon the customs of

the country and the character of the people, who “after all,” as she was

fond of saying, were the most convenient in the world to live with.

“You mustn’t think it strange her remaining here at such a time as this,

when Mr. Touchett’s passing away,” that gentleman’s wife remarked to her

niece. “She is incapable of a mistake; she’s the most tactful woman I

know. It’s a favour to me that she stays; she’s putting off a lot of

visits at great houses,” said Mrs. Touchett, who never forgot that when

she herself was in England her social value sank two or three degrees in

the scale. “She has her pick of places; she’s not in want of a shelter.

But I’ve asked her to put in this time because I wish you to know her. I

think it will be a good thing for you. Serena Merle hasn’t a fault.”

“If I didn’t already like her very much that description might alarm

me,” Isabel returned.

“She’s never the least little bit ‘off.’ I’ve brought you out here and I

wish to do the best for you. Your sister Lily told me she hoped I would

give you plenty of opportunities. I give you one in putting you in

relation with Madame Merle. She’s one of the most brilliant women in

Europe.”

“I like her better than I like your description of her,” Isabel

persisted in saying.

“Do you flatter yourself that you’ll ever feel her open to criticism? I

hope you’ll let me know when you do.”

“That will be cruel--to you,” said Isabel.

“You needn’t mind me. You won’t discover a fault in her.”

“Perhaps not. But I dare say I shan’t miss it.”

“She knows absolutely everything on earth there is to know,” said Mrs.

Touchett.

Isabel after this observed to their companion that she hoped she knew

Mrs. Touchett considered she hadn’t a speck on her perfection. On which

“I’m obliged to you,” Madame Merle replied, “but I’m afraid your aunt

imagines, or at least alludes to, no aberrations that the clock-face

doesn’t register.”

“So that you mean you’ve a wild side that’s unknown to her?”

“Ah no, I fear my darkest sides are my tamest. I mean that having no

faults, for your aunt, means that one’s never late for dinner--that is

for her dinner. I was not late, by the way, the other day, when you

came back from London; the clock was just at eight when I came into the

drawing-room: it was the rest of you that were before the time. It means

that one answers a letter the day one gets it and that when one comes to

stay with her one doesn’t bring too much luggage and is careful not to

be taken ill. For Mrs. Touchett those things constitute virtue; it’s a

blessing to be able to reduce it to its elements.”

Madame Merle’s own conversation, it will be perceived, was enriched with

bold, free touches of criticism, which, even when they had a restrictive

effect, never struck Isabel as ill-natured. It couldn’t occur to the

girl for instance that Mrs. Touchett’s accomplished guest was abusing

her; and this for very good reasons. In the first place Isabel rose

eagerly to the sense of her shades; in the second Madame Merle implied

that there was a great deal more to say; and it was clear in the

third that for a person to speak to one without ceremony of one’s near

relations was an agreeable sign of that person’s intimacy with one’s

self. These signs of deep communion multiplied as the days elapsed, and

there was none of which Isabel was more sensible than of her companion’s

preference for making Miss Archer herself a topic. Though she referred

frequently to the incidents of her own career she never lingered upon

them; she was as little of a gross egotist as she was of a flat gossip.

“I’m old and stale and faded,” she said more than once; “I’m of no

more interest than last week’s newspaper. You’re young and fresh and of

to-day; you’ve the great thing--you’ve actuality. I once had it--we all

have it for an hour. You, however, will have it for longer. Let us talk

about you then; you can say nothing I shall not care to hear. It’s a

sign that I’m growing old--that I like to talk with younger people. I

think it’s a very pretty compensation. If we can’t have youth within us

we can have it outside, and I really think we see it and feel it better

that way. Of course we must be in sympathy with it--that I shall always

be. I don’t know that I shall ever be ill-natured with old people--I

hope not; there are certainly some old people I adore. But I shall never

be anything but abject with the young; they touch me and appeal to me

too much. I give you _carte blanche_ then; you can even be impertinent if

you like; I shall let it pass and horribly spoil you. I speak as if I

were a hundred years old, you say? Well, I am, if you please; I was born

before the French Revolution. Ah, my dear, _je viens de loin_; I belong to

the old, old world. But it’s not of that I want to talk; I want to talk

about the new. You must tell me more about America; you never tell me

enough. Here I’ve been since I was brought here as a helpless child, and

it’s ridiculous, or rather it’s scandalous, how little I know about that

splendid, dreadful, funny country--surely the greatest and drollest of

them all. There are a great many of us like that in these parts, and I

must say I think we’re a wretched set of people. You should live in your

own land; whatever it may be you have your natural place there. If we’re

not good Americans we’re certainly poor Europeans; we’ve no natural

place here. We’re mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t

our feet in the soil. At least one can know it and not have illusions. A

woman perhaps can get on; a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place

anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface

and, more or less, to crawl. You protest, my dear? you’re horrified?

you declare you’ll never crawl? It’s very true that I don’t see you

crawling; you stand more upright than a good many poor creatures.

Very good; on the whole, I don’t think you’ll crawl. But the men, the

Americans; _je vous demande un peu_, what do they make of it over here?

I don’t envy them trying to arrange themselves. Look at poor Ralph

Touchett: what sort of a figure do you call that? Fortunately he has a

consumption; I say fortunately, because it gives him something to do.

His consumption’s his _carriere_ it’s a kind of position. You can say:

‘Oh, Mr. Touchett, he takes care of his lungs, he knows a great deal

about climates.’ But without that who would he be, what would he

represent? ‘Mr. Ralph Touchett: an American who lives in Europe.’ That

signifies absolutely nothing--it’s impossible anything should signify

less. ‘He’s very cultivated,’ they say: ‘he has a very pretty collection

of old snuff-boxes.’ The collection is all that’s wanted to make it

pitiful. I’m tired of the sound of the word; I think it’s grotesque.

With the poor old father it’s different; he has his identity, and it’s

rather a massive one. He represents a great financial house, and that,

in our day, is as good as anything else. For an American, at any rate,

that will do very well. But I persist in thinking your cousin very lucky

to have a chronic malady so long as he doesn’t die of it. It’s much

better than the snuffboxes. If he weren’t ill, you say, he’d do

something?--he’d take his father’s place in the house. My poor child, I

doubt it; I don’t think he’s at all fond of the house. However, you know

him better than I, though I used to know him rather well, and he may

have the benefit of the doubt. The worst case, I think, is a friend

of mine, a countryman of ours, who lives in Italy (where he also was

brought before he knew better), and who is one of the most delightful

men I know. Some day you must know him. I’ll bring you together and then

you’ll see what I mean. He’s Gilbert Osmond--he lives in Italy; that’s

all one can say about him or make of him. He’s exceedingly clever, a

man made to be distinguished; but, as I tell you, you exhaust the

description when you say he’s Mr. Osmond who lives _tout bêtement_ in

Italy. No career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future,

no anything. Oh yes, he paints, if you please--paints in water-colours;

like me, only better than I. His painting’s pretty bad; on the whole I’m

rather glad of that. Fortunately he’s very indolent, so indolent that

it amounts to a sort of position. He can say, ‘Oh, I do nothing; I’m too

deadly lazy. You can do nothing to-day unless you get up at five o’clock

in the morning.’ In that way he becomes a sort of exception; you feel

he might do something if he’d only rise early. He never speaks of his

painting to people at large; he’s too clever for that. But he has a

little girl--a dear little girl; he does speak of her. He’s devoted

to her, and if it were a career to be an excellent father he’d be very

distinguished. But I’m afraid that’s no better than the snuff-boxes;

perhaps not even so good. Tell me what they do in America,” pursued

Madame Merle, who, it must be observed parenthetically, did not deliver

herself all at once of these reflexions, which are presented in a

cluster for the convenience of the reader. She talked of Florence, where

Mr. Osmond lived and where Mrs. Touchett occupied a medieval palace; she

talked of Rome, where she herself had a little _pied-à-terre_ with some

rather good old damask. She talked of places, of people and even, as the

phrase is, of “subjects”; and from time to time she talked of their kind

old host and of the prospect of his recovery. From the first she

had thought this prospect small, and Isabel had been struck with the

positive, discriminating, competent way in which she took the measure

of his remainder of life. One evening she announced definitely that he

wouldn’t live.

“Sir Matthew Hope told me so as plainly as was proper,” she said;

“standing there, near the fire, before dinner. He makes himself very

agreeable, the great doctor. I don’t mean his saying that has anything

to do with it. But he says such things with great tact. I had told him

I felt ill at my ease, staying here at such a time; it seemed to me so

indiscreet--it wasn’t as if I could nurse. ‘You must remain, you must

remain,’ he answered; ‘your office will come later.’ Wasn’t that a very

delicate way of saying both that poor Mr. Touchett would go and that I

might be of some use as a consoler? In fact, however, I shall not be of

the slightest use. Your aunt will console herself; she, and she alone,

knows just how much consolation she’ll require. It would be a very

delicate matter for another person to undertake to administer the dose.

With your cousin it will be different; he’ll miss his father immensely.

But I should never presume to condole with Mr. Ralph; we’re not on

those terms.” Madame Merle had alluded more than once to some undefined

incongruity in her relations with Ralph Touchett; so Isabel took this

occasion of asking her if they were not good friends.

“Perfectly, but he doesn’t like me.”

“What have you done to him?”

“Nothing whatever. But one has no need of a reason for that.”

“For not liking you? I think one has need of a very good reason.”

“You’re very kind. Be sure you have one ready for the day you begin.”

“Begin to dislike you? I shall never begin.”

“I hope not; because if you do you’ll never end. That’s the way with

your cousin; he doesn’t get over it. It’s an antipathy of nature--if

I can call it that when it’s all on his side. I’ve nothing whatever

against him and don’t bear him the least little grudge for not doing me

justice. Justice is all I want. However, one feels that he’s a gentleman

and would never say anything underhand about one. _Cartes sur table_,”

Madame Merle subjoined in a moment, “I’m not afraid of him.”

“I hope not indeed,” said Isabel, who added something about his being

the kindest creature living. She remembered, however, that on her first

asking him about Madame Merle he had answered her in a manner which

this lady might have thought injurious without being explicit. There

was something between them, Isabel said to herself, but she said nothing

more than this. If it were something of importance it should inspire

respect; if it were not it was not worth her curiosity. With all her

love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and

looking into unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her

mind with the finest capacity for ignorance.

But Madame Merle sometimes said things that startled her, made her raise

her clear eyebrows at the time and think of the words afterwards. “I’d

give a great deal to be your age again,” she broke out once with a

bitterness which, though diluted in her customary amplitude of ease, was

imperfectly disguised by it. “If I could only begin again--if I could

have my life before me!”

“Your life’s before you yet,” Isabel answered gently, for she was

vaguely awe-struck.

“No; the best part’s gone, and gone for nothing.”

“Surely not for nothing,” said Isabel.

“Why not--what have I got? Neither husband, nor child, nor fortune, nor

position, nor the traces of a beauty that I never had.”

“You have many friends, dear lady.”

“I’m not so sure!” cried Madame Merle.

“Ah, you’re wrong. You have memories, graces, talents--”

But Madame Merle interrupted her. “What have my talents brought me?

Nothing but the need of using them still, to get through the hours,

the years, to cheat myself with some pretence of movement, of

unconsciousness. As for my graces and memories the less said about them

the better. You’ll be my friend till you find a better use for your

friendship.”

“It will be for you to see that I don’t then,” said Isabel.

“Yes; I would make an effort to keep you.” And her companion looked at

her gravely. “When I say I should like to be your age I mean with your

qualities--frank, generous, sincere like you. In that case I should have

made something better of my life.”

“What should you have liked to do that you’ve not done?”

Madame Merle took a sheet of music--she was seated at the piano and

had abruptly wheeled about on the stool when she first spoke--and

mechanically turned the leaves. “I’m very ambitious!” she at last

replied.

“And your ambitions have not been satisfied? They must have been great.”

“They _were_ great. I should make myself ridiculous by talking of them.”

Isabel wondered what they could have been--whether Madame Merle had

aspired to wear a crown. “I don’t know what your idea of success may be,

but you seem to me to have been successful. To me indeed you’re a vivid

image of success.”

Madame Merle tossed away the music with a smile. “What’s _your_ idea of

success?”

“You evidently think it must be a very tame one. It’s to see some dream

of one’s youth come true.”

“Ah,” Madame Merle exclaimed, “that I’ve never seen! But my dreams were

so great--so preposterous. Heaven forgive me, I’m dreaming now!” And she

turned back to the piano and began grandly to play. On the morrow she

said to Isabel that her definition of success had been very pretty,

yet frightfully sad. Measured in that way, who had ever succeeded? The

dreams of one’s youth, why they were enchanting, they were divine! Who

had ever seen such things come to pass?

“I myself--a few of them,” Isabel ventured to answer.

“Already? They must have been dreams of yesterday.”

“I began to dream very young,” Isabel smiled.

“Ah, if you mean the aspirations of your childhood--that of having a

pink sash and a doll that could close her eyes.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“Or a young man with a fine moustache going down on his knees to you.”

“No, nor that either,” Isabel declared with still more emphasis.

Madame Merle appeared to note this eagerness. “I suspect that’s what

you do mean. We’ve all had the young man with the moustache. He’s the

inevitable young man; he doesn’t count.”

Isabel was silent a little but then spoke with extreme and

characteristic inconsequence. “Why shouldn’t he count? There are young

men and young men.”

“And yours was a paragon--is that what you mean?” asked her friend with

a laugh. “If you’ve had the identical young man you dreamed of, then

that was success, and I congratulate you with all my heart. Only in that

case why didn’t you fly with him to his castle in the Apennines?”

“He has no castle in the Apennines.”

“What has he? An ugly brick house in Fortieth Street? Don’t tell me

that; I refuse to recognise that as an ideal.”

“I don’t care anything about his house,” said Isabel.

“That’s very crude of you. When you’ve lived as long as I you’ll see

that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell

into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances.

There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us

made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’?

Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything

that belongs to us--and then it flows back again. I know a large part

of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for

_things_! One’s self--for other people--is one’s expression of one’s self;

and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads,

the company one keeps--these things are all expressive.”

This was very metaphysical; not more so, however, than several

observations Madame Merle had already made. Isabel was fond of

metaphysics, but was unable to accompany her friend into this bold

analysis of the human personality. “I don’t agree with you. I think just

the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but

I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any

measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and

a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I

choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should!”

“You dress very well,” Madame Merle lightly interposed.

“Possibly; but I don’t care to be judged by that. My clothes may express

the dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with it’s not my own

choice that I wear them; they’re imposed upon me by society.”

“Should you prefer to go without them?” Madame Merle enquired in a tone

which virtually terminated the discussion.

I am bound to confess, though it may cast some discredit on the sketch I

have given of the youthful loyalty practised by our heroine toward this

accomplished woman, that Isabel had said nothing whatever to her about

Lord Warburton and had been equally reticent on the subject of Caspar

Goodwood. She had not, however, concealed the fact that she had had

opportunities of marrying and had even let her friend know of how

advantageous a kind they had been. Lord Warburton had left Lockleigh

and was gone to Scotland, taking his sisters with him; and though he had

written to Ralph more than once to ask about Mr. Touchett’s health the

girl was not liable to the embarrassment of such enquiries as, had he

still been in the neighbourhood, he would probably have felt bound to

make in person. He had excellent ways, but she felt sure that if he had

come to Gardencourt he would have seen Madame Merle, and that if he had

seen her he would have liked her and betrayed to her that he was in love

with her young friend. It so happened that during this lady’s previous

visits to Gardencourt--each of them much shorter than the present--he

had either not been at Lockleigh or had not called at Mr. Touchett’s.

Therefore, though she knew him by name as the great man of that

county, she had no cause to suspect him as a suitor of Mrs. Touchett’s

freshly-imported niece.

“You’ve plenty of time,” she had said to Isabel in return for the

mutilated confidences which our young woman made her and which didn’t

pretend to be perfect, though we have seen that at moments the girl

had compunctions at having said so much. “I’m glad you’ve done nothing

yet--that you have it still to do. It’s a very good thing for a girl to

have refused a few good offers--so long of course as they are not the

best she’s likely to have. Pardon me if my tone seems horribly corrupt;

one must take the worldly view sometimes. Only don’t keep on refusing

for the sake of refusing. It’s a pleasant exercise of power; but

accepting’s after all an exercise of power as well. There’s always the

danger of refusing once too often. It was not the one I fell into--I

didn’t refuse often enough. You’re an exquisite creature, and I should

like to see you married to a prime minister. But speaking strictly, you

know, you’re not what is technically called a _parti_. You’re extremely

good-looking and extremely clever; in yourself you’re quite exceptional.

You appear to have the vaguest ideas about your earthly possessions; but

from what I can make out you’re not embarrassed with an income. I wish

you had a little money.”

“I wish I had!” said Isabel, simply, apparently forgetting for the

moment that her poverty had been a venial fault for two gallant

gentlemen.

In spite of Sir Matthew Hope’s benevolent recommendation Madame Merle

did not remain to the end, as the issue of poor Mr. Touchett’s malady

had now come frankly to be designated. She was under pledges to other

people which had at last to be redeemed, and she left Gardencourt with

the understanding that she should in any event see Mrs. Touchett there

again, or else in town, before quitting England. Her parting with Isabel

was even more like the beginning of a friendship than their meeting had

been. “I’m going to six places in succession, but I shall see no one I

like so well as you. They’ll all be old friends, however; one doesn’t

make new friends at my age. I’ve made a great exception for you. You

must remember that and must think as well of me as possible. You must

reward me by believing in me.”

By way of answer Isabel kissed her, and, though some women kiss with

facility, there are kisses and kisses, and this embrace was satisfactory

to Madame Merle. Our young lady, after this, was much alone; she saw her

aunt and cousin only at meals, and discovered that of the hours during

which Mrs. Touchett was invisible only a minor portion was now devoted

to nursing her husband. She spent the rest in her own apartments, to

which access was not allowed even to her niece, apparently occupied

there with mysterious and inscrutable exercises. At table she was grave

and silent; but her solemnity was not an attitude--Isabel could see it

was a conviction. She wondered if her aunt repented of having taken her

own way so much; but there was no visible evidence of this--no tears, no

sighs, no exaggeration of a zeal always to its own sense adequate. Mrs.

Touchett seemed simply to feel the need of thinking things over and

summing them up; she had a little moral account-book--with columns

unerringly ruled and a sharp steel clasp--which she kept with exemplary

neatness. Uttered reflection had with her ever, at any rate, a practical

ring. “If I had foreseen this I’d not have proposed your coming abroad

now,” she said to Isabel after Madame Merle had left the house. “I’d

have waited and sent for you next year.”

“So that perhaps I should never have known my uncle? It’s a great

happiness to me to have come now.”

“That’s very well. But it was not that you might know your uncle that

I brought you to Europe.” A perfectly veracious speech; but, as Isabel

thought, not as perfectly timed. She had leisure to think of this and

other matters. She took a solitary walk every day and spent vague hours

in turning over books in the library. Among the subjects that engaged

her attention were the adventures of her friend Miss Stackpole, with

whom she was in regular correspondence. Isabel liked her friend’s

private epistolary style better than her public; that is she felt her

public letters would have been excellent if they had not been printed.

Henrietta’s career, however, was not so successful as might have been

wished even in the interest of her private felicity; that view of the

inner life of Great Britain which she was so eager to take appeared to

dance before her like an _ignis fatuus_. The invitation from Lady Pensil,

for mysterious reasons, had never arrived; and poor Mr. Bantling

himself, with all his friendly ingenuity, had been unable to explain

so grave a dereliction on the part of a missive that had obviously been

sent. He had evidently taken Henrietta’s affairs much to heart,

and believed that he owed her a set-off to this illusory visit to

Bedfordshire. “He says he should think I would go to the Continent,”

Henrietta wrote; “and as he thinks of going there himself I suppose his

advice is sincere. He wants to know why I don’t take a view of French

life; and it’s a fact that I want very much to see the new Republic. Mr.

Bantling doesn’t care much about the Republic, but he thinks of going

over to Paris anyway. I must say he’s quite as attentive as I could

wish, and at least I shall have seen one polite Englishman. I keep

telling Mr. Bantling that he ought to have been an American, and you

should see how that pleases him. Whenever I say so he always breaks out

with the same exclamation--‘Ah, but really, come now!” A few days later

she wrote that she had decided to go to Paris at the end of the week and

that Mr. Bantling had promised to see her off--perhaps even would go

as far as Dover with her. She would wait in Paris till Isabel should

arrive, Henrietta added; speaking quite as if Isabel were to start on

her continental journey alone and making no allusion to Mrs. Touchett.

Bearing in mind his interest in their late companion, our heroine

communicated several passages from this correspondence to Ralph,

who followed with an emotion akin to suspense the career of the

representative of the _Interviewer_.

“It seems to me she’s doing very well,” he said, “going over to Paris

with an ex-Lancer! If she wants something to write about she has only to

describe that episode.”

“It’s not conventional, certainly,” Isabel answered; “but if you mean

that--as far as Henrietta is concerned--it’s not perfectly innocent,

you’re very much mistaken. You’ll never understand Henrietta.”

“Pardon me, I understand her perfectly. I didn’t at all at first, but

now I’ve the point of view. I’m afraid, however, that Bantling hasn’t;

he may have some surprises. Oh, I understand Henrietta as well as if I

had made her!”

Isabel was by no means sure of this, but she abstained from expressing

further doubt, for she was disposed in these days to extend a great

charity to her cousin. One afternoon less than a week after Madame

Merle’s departure she was seated in the library with a volume to

which her attention was not fastened. She had placed herself in a deep

window-bench, from which she looked out into the dull, damp park; and as

the library stood at right angles to the entrance-front of the house she

could see the doctor’s brougham, which had been waiting for the last two

hours before the door. She was struck with his remaining so long, but at

last she saw him appear in the portico, stand a moment slowly drawing on

his gloves and looking at the knees of his horse, and then get into the

vehicle and roll away. Isabel kept her place for half an hour; there was

a great stillness in the house. It was so great that when she at last

heard a soft, slow step on the deep carpet of the room she was almost

startled by the sound. She turned quickly away from the window and saw

Ralph Touchett standing there with his hands still in his pockets, but

with a face absolutely void of its usual latent smile. She got up and

her movement and glance were a question.

“It’s all over,” said Ralph.

“Do you mean that my uncle...?” And Isabel stopped.

“My dear father died an hour ago.”

“Ah, my poor Ralph!” she gently wailed, putting out her two hands to

him.