第 二十一 章 · Chapter XXI

Mrs. Touchett, before arriving in Paris, had fixed the day for her

departure and by the middle of February had begun to travel southward.

She interrupted her journey to pay a visit to her son, who at San Remo,

on the Italian shore of the Mediterranean, had been spending a dull,

bright winter beneath a slow-moving white umbrella. Isabel went with her

aunt as a matter of course, though Mrs. Touchett, with homely, customary

logic, had laid before her a pair of alternatives.

“Now, of course, you’re completely your own mistress and are as free as

the bird on the bough. I don’t mean you were not so before, but you’re

at present on a different footing--property erects a kind of barrier.

You can do a great many things if you’re rich which would be severely

criticised if you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone,

you can have your own establishment: I mean of course if you’ll take

a companion--some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere and dyed

hair, who paints on velvet. You don’t think you’d like that? Of course

you can do as you please; I only want you to understand how much you’re

at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole as your _dame de compagnie_;

she’d keep people off very well. I think, however, that it’s a great

deal better you should remain with me, in spite of there being no

obligation. It’s better for several reasons, quite apart from your

liking it. I shouldn’t think you’d like it, but I recommend you to make

the sacrifice. Of course whatever novelty there may have been at first

in my society has quite passed away, and you see me as I am--a dull,

obstinate, narrow-minded old woman.”

“I don’t think you’re at all dull,” Isabel had replied to this.

“But you do think I’m obstinate and narrow-minded? I told you so!” said

Mrs. Touchett with much elation at being justified.

Isabel remained for the present with her aunt, because, in spite of

eccentric impulses, she had a great regard for what was usually deemed

decent, and a young gentlewoman without visible relations had always

struck her as a flower without foliage. It was true that Mrs. Touchett’s

conversation had never again appeared so brilliant as that first

afternoon in Albany, when she sat in her damp waterproof and sketched

the opportunities that Europe would offer to a young person of taste.

This, however, was in a great measure the girl’s own fault; she had

got a glimpse of her aunt’s experience, and her imagination constantly

anticipated the judgements and emotions of a woman who had very little

of the same faculty. Apart from this, Mrs. Touchett had a great merit;

she was as honest as a pair of compasses. There was a comfort in her

stiffness and firmness; you knew exactly where to find her and were

never liable to chance encounters and concussions. On her own ground

she was perfectly present, but was never over-inquisitive as regards

the territory of her neighbour. Isabel came at last to have a kind of

undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed something so dreary in

the condition of a person whose nature had, as it were, so little

surface--offered so limited a face to the accretions of human contact.

Nothing tender, nothing sympathetic, had ever had a chance to fasten

upon it--no wind-sown blossom, no familiar softening moss. Her offered,

her passive extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge.

Isabel had reason to believe none the less that as she advanced in life

she made more of those concessions to the sense of something obscurely

distinct from convenience--more of them than she independently exacted.

She was learning to sacrifice consistency to considerations of that

inferior order for which the excuse must be found in the particular

case. It was not to the credit of her absolute rectitude that she should

have gone the longest way round to Florence in order to spend a few

weeks with her invalid son; since in former years it had been one of her

most definite convictions that when Ralph wished to see her he was at

liberty to remember that Palazzo Crescentini contained a large apartment

known as the quarter of the _signorino_.

“I want to ask you something,” Isabel said to this young man the day

after her arrival at San Remo--“something I’ve thought more than once

of asking you by letter, but that I’ve hesitated on the whole to write

about. Face to face, nevertheless, my question seems easy enough. Did

you know your father intended to leave me so much money?”

Ralph stretched his legs a little further than usual and gazed a little

more fixedly at the Mediterranean.

“What does it matter, my dear Isabel, whether I knew? My father was very

obstinate.”

“So,” said the girl, “you did know.”

“Yes; he told me. We even talked it over a little.” “What did he do it

for?” asked Isabel abruptly. “Why, as a kind of compliment.”

“A compliment on what?”

“On your so beautifully existing.”

“He liked me too much,” she presently declared.

“That’s a way we all have.”

“If I believed that I should be very unhappy. Fortunately I don’t

believe it. I want to be treated with justice; I want nothing but that.”

“Very good. But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is

after all a florid sort of sentiment.”

“I’m not a lovely being. How can you say that, at the very moment when

I’m asking such odious questions? I must seem to you delicate!”

“You seem to me troubled,” said Ralph.

“I am troubled.”

“About what?”

For a moment she answered nothing; then she broke out: “Do you think it

good for me suddenly to be made so rich? Henrietta doesn’t.”

“Oh, hang Henrietta!” said Ralph coarsely, “If you ask me I’m delighted

at it.”

“Is that why your father did it--for your amusement?”

“I differ with Miss Stackpole,” Ralph went on more gravely. “I think it

very good for you to have means.”

Isabel looked at him with serious eyes. “I wonder whether you know

what’s good for me--or whether you care.”

“If I know depend upon it I care. Shall I tell you what it is? Not to

torment yourself.”

“Not to torment you, I suppose you mean.”

“You can’t do that; I’m proof. Take things more easily. Don’t ask

yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question

your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed

piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your

character--it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.

Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most

things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable

income’s not one of them.” Ralph paused, smiling; Isabel had listened

quickly. “You’ve too much power of thought--above all too much

conscience,” Ralph added. “It’s out of all reason, the number of things

you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet your fever. Spread your

wings; rise above the ground. It’s never wrong to do that.”

She had listened eagerly, as I say; and it was her nature to understand

quickly. “I wonder if you appreciate what you say. If you do, you take a

great responsibility.”

“You frighten me a little, but I think I’m right,” said Ralph,

persisting in cheer.

“All the same what you say is very true,” Isabel pursued. “You could say

nothing more true. I’m absorbed in myself--I look at life too much as

a doctor’s prescription. Why indeed should we perpetually be thinking

whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a

hospital? Why should I be so afraid of not doing right? As if it

mattered to the world whether I do right or wrong!”

“You’re a capital person to advise,” said Ralph; “you take the wind out

of my sails!”

She looked at him as if she had not heard him--though she was following

out the train of reflexion which he himself had kindled. “I try to

care more about the world than about myself--but I always come back to

myself. It’s because I’m afraid.” She stopped; her voice had trembled

a little. “Yes, I’m afraid; I can’t tell you. A large fortune means

freedom, and I’m afraid of that. It’s such a fine thing, and one should

make such a good use of it. If one shouldn’t one would be ashamed. And

one must keep thinking; it’s a constant effort. I’m not sure it’s not a

greater happiness to be powerless.”

“For weak people I’ve no doubt it’s a greater happiness. For weak people

the effort not to be contemptible must be great.”

“And how do you know I’m not weak?” Isabel asked.

“Ah,” Ralph answered with a flush that the girl noticed, “if you are I’m

awfully sold!”

The charm of the Mediterranean coast only deepened for our heroine

on acquaintance, for it was the threshold of Italy, the gate of

admirations. Italy, as yet imperfectly seen and felt, stretched before

her as a land of promise, a land in which a love of the beautiful might

be comforted by endless knowledge. Whenever she strolled upon the shore

with her cousin--and she was the companion of his daily walk--she looked

across the sea, with longing eyes, to where she knew that Genoa lay. She

was glad to pause, however, on the edge of this larger adventure; there

was such a thrill even in the preliminary hovering. It affected her

moreover as a peaceful interlude, as a hush of the drum and fife in a

career which she had little warrant as yet for regarding as agitated,

but which nevertheless she was constantly picturing to herself by

the light of her hopes, her fears, her fancies, her ambitions, her

predilections, and which reflected these subjective accidents in

a manner sufficiently dramatic. Madame Merle had predicted to Mrs.

Touchett that after their young friend had put her hand into her pocket

half a dozen times she would be reconciled to the idea that it had been

filled by a munificent uncle; and the event justified, as it had so

often justified before, that lady’s perspicacity. Ralph Touchett had

praised his cousin for being morally inflammable, that is for being

quick to take a hint that was meant as good advice. His advice had

perhaps helped the matter; she had at any rate before leaving San Remo

grown used to feeling rich. The consciousness in question found a

proper place in rather a dense little group of ideas that she had about

herself, and often it was by no means the least agreeable. It took

perpetually for granted a thousand good intentions. She lost herself in

a maze of visions; the fine things to be done by a rich, independent,

generous girl who took a large human view of occasions and obligations

were sublime in the mass. Her fortune therefore became to her mind a

part of her better self; it gave her importance, gave her even, to her

own imagination, a certain ideal beauty. What it did for her in the

imagination of others is another affair, and on this point we must also

touch in time. The visions I have just spoken of were mixed with other

debates. Isabel liked better to think of the future than of the past;

but at times, as she listened to the murmur of the Mediterranean waves,

her glance took a backward flight. It rested upon two figures which, in

spite of increasing distance, were still sufficiently salient; they were

recognisable without difficulty as those of Caspar Goodwood and Lord

Warburton. It was strange how quickly these images of energy had fallen

into the background of our young lady’s life. It was in her disposition

at all times to lose faith in the reality of absent things; she could

summon back her faith, in case of need, with an effort, but the effort

was often painful even when the reality had been pleasant. The past was

apt to look dead and its revival rather to show the livid light of a

judgement-day. The girl moreover was not prone to take for granted that

she herself lived in the mind of others--she had not the fatuity to

believe she left indelible traces. She was capable of being wounded by

the discovery that she had been forgotten; but of all liberties the one

she herself found sweetest was the liberty to forget. She had not given

her last shilling, sentimentally speaking, either to Caspar Goodwood or

to Lord Warburton, and yet couldn’t but feel them appreciably in debt

to her. She had of course reminded herself that she was to hear from Mr.

Goodwood again; but this was not to be for another year and a half, and

in that time a great many things might happen. She had indeed failed to

say to herself that her American suitor might find some other girl more

comfortable to woo; because, though it was certain many other girls

would prove so, she had not the smallest belief that this merit

would attract him. But she reflected that she herself might know the

humiliation of change, might really, for that matter, come to the end of

the things that were not Caspar (even though there appeared so many of

them), and find rest in those very elements of his presence which struck

her now as impediments to the finer respiration. It was conceivable

that these impediments should some day prove a sort of blessing

in disguise--a clear and quiet harbour enclosed by a brave granite

breakwater. But that day could only come in its order, and she couldn’t

wait for it with folded hands. That Lord Warburton should continue

to cherish her image seemed to her more than a noble humility or an

enlightened pride ought to wish to reckon with. She had so definitely

undertaken to preserve no record of what had passed between them that a

corresponding effort on his own part would be eminently just. This

was not, as it may seem, merely a theory tinged with sarcasm. Isabel

candidly believed that his lordship would, in the usual phrase, get over

his disappointment. He had been deeply affected--this she believed, and

she was still capable of deriving pleasure from the belief; but it

was absurd that a man both so intelligent and so honourably dealt with

should cultivate a scar out of proportion to any wound. Englishmen

liked moreover to be comfortable, said Isabel, and there could be

little comfort for Lord Warburton, in the long run, in brooding over a

self-sufficient American girl who had been but a casual acquaintance.

She flattered herself that, should she hear from one day to another that

he had married some young woman of his own country who had done more

to deserve him, she should receive the news without a pang even of

surprise. It would have proved that he believed she was firm--which was

what she wished to seem to him. That alone was grateful to her pride.