The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 2

by Henry James

  CHAPTER XXXI

  Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an intervalsufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during thisinterval that we are closely concerned with her; our attention isengaged again on a certain day in the late spring-time, shortly afterher return to Palazzo Crescentini and a year from the date of theincidents just narrated. She was alone on this occasion, in one of thesmaller of the numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses,and there was that in her expression and attitude which would havesuggested that she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open,and though its green shutters were partly drawn the bright air of thegarden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room withwarmth and perfume. Our young woman stood near it for some time, herhands clasped behind her; she gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest.Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle. Yet it could notbe in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he shouldpass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not throughthe garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wishedrather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judgeby the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Graveshe found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience ofthe 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, andwas therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from thefrivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measureof Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before. Sheflattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned a great dealmore of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected. Ifher thoughts just now had inclined themselves to retrospect, insteadof fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would haveevoked a multitude of interesting pictures. These pictures would havebeen both landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would havebeen the more numerous. With several of the images that might have beenprojected on such a field we are already acquainted. There would be forinstance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine's sister and Edmund Ludlow'swife, who had come out from New York to spend five months with herrelative. She had left her husband behind her, but had broughther children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence andtenderness the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, hadbeen able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossingthe ocean with extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladiesin Paris before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet,even from the American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age; sothat while her sister was with her Isabel had confined her movements toa narrow circle. Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland inthe month of July, and they had spent a summer of fine weather in anAlpine valley where the flowers were thick in the meadows and the shadeof great chestnuts made a resting-place for such upward wanderings asmight be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. They hadafterwards reached the French capital, which was worshipped, and withcostly 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 herhandkerchief.

  Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts andwonderments not allayed at that altar; and after her husband had joinedher found further chagrin in his failure to throw himself into thesespeculations. They all had Isabel for subject; but Edmund Ludlow, ashe had always done before, declined to be surprised, or distressed, ormystified, or elated, at anything his sister-in-law might have doneor have failed to do. Mrs. Ludlow's mental motions were sufficientlyvarious. At one moment she thought it would be so natural for that youngwoman to come home and take a house in New York--the Rossiters', forinstance, which had an elegant conservatory and was just round thecorner from her own; at another she couldn't conceal her surprise at thegirl's not marrying some member of one of the great aristocracies. Onthe whole, as I have said, she had fallen from high communion with theprobabilities. She had taken more satisfaction in Isabel's accession offortune than if the money had been left to herself; it had seemed to herto offer just the proper setting for her sister's slightly meagre, butscarce the less eminent figure. Isabel had developed less, however, thanLily had thought likely--development, to Lily's understanding, beingsomehow mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties.Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides; but sheappeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which Mrs.Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily's conception of suchachievements was extremely vague; but this was exactly what she hadexpected of Isabel--to give it form and body. Isabel could have doneas well as she had done in New York; and Mrs. Ludlow appealed to herhusband to know whether there was any privilege she enjoyed in Europewhich the society of that city might not offer her. We know ourselvesthat Isabel had made conquests--whether inferior or not to those shemight have effected in her native land it would be a delicate matter todecide; and it is not altogether with a feeling of complacency thatI again mention that she had not rendered these honourable victoriespublic. She had not told her sister the history of Lord Warburton, norhad she given her a hint of Mr. Osmond's state of mind; and she had hadno 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, ofromance, she was as little disposed to ask poor Lily's advice as shewould have been to close that rare volume forever. But Lily knew nothingof these discriminations, and could only pronounce her sister's careera strange anti-climax--an impression confirmed by the fact that Isabel'ssilence about Mr. Osmond, for instance, was in direct proportion to thefrequency with which he occupied her thoughts. As this happened veryoften it sometimes appeared to Mrs. Ludlow that she had lost hercourage. So uncanny a result of so exhilarating an incident asinheriting a fortune was of course perplexing to the cheerful Lily; itadded to her general sense that Isabel was not at all like other people.

  Our young lady's courage, however, might have been taken as reachingits height after her relations had gone home. She could imagine braverthings than spending the winter in Paris--Paris had sides by which itso resembled New York, Paris was like smart, neat prose--and her closecorrespondence with Madame Merle did much to stimulate such flights. Shehad never had a keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness andwantonness of liberty, than when she turned away from the platformat the Euston Station on one of the last days of November, after thedeparture of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband and herchildren 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, ofwhat was good for her, and her effort was constantly to find somethingthat was good enough. To profit by the present advantage till the latestmoment she had made the journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers.She would have accompanied them to Liverpool as well, only Edmund Ludlowhad asked her, as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety andshe asked such impossible questions. Isabel watched the train move away;she kissed her hand to the elder of her small nephews, a demonstrativechild who leaned dangerously far out of the window of the carriage andmade separation an occasion of violent hilarity, and then she walkedback into the foggy London street. The world lay before her--she coulddo whatever she chose. There was a deep thrill in it all, but for thepresent her choice was tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk backfrom Euston Square to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoonhad already closed in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air, lookedweak and red; our heroine was unattended and Euston Square was a longway from Piccadilly. But Isabel performed the journey with a positiveenjoyment of its dangers and lost her way almost on purpose, in orderto get more sensations, so that she was disappointed when an obligingpoliceman easily set her right again. She was so fond of the spectacleof human life that she enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in theLondon streets--the movin
g crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops,the flaring stalls, the dark, shining dampness of everything. Thatevening, at her hotel, she wrote to Madame Merle that she should startin a day or two for Rome. She made her way down to Rome without touchingat Florence--having gone first to Venice and then proceeded southward byAncona. She accomplished this journey without other assistance than thatof her servant, for her natural protectors were not now on the ground.Ralph Touchett was spending the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, inthe September previous, had been recalled to America by a telegram fromthe Interviewer. This journal offered its brilliant correspondent afresher field for her genius than the mouldering cities of Europe, andHenrietta was cheered on her way by a promise from Mr. Bantling thathe would soon come over to see her. Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett toapologise for not presenting herself just yet in Florence, and her auntreplied characteristically enough. Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated,were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealtin 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 theidea 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. Sheeasily forgave her niece for not stopping at Florence, because shetook it for a sign that Gilbert Osmond was less in question there thanformerly. She watched of course to see if he would now find a pretextfor going to Rome, and derived some comfort from learning that he hadnot been guilty of an absence. Isabel, on her side, had not been afortnight in Rome before she proposed to Madame Merle that they shouldmake a little pilgrimage to the East. Madame Merle remarked that herfriend was restless, but she added that she herself had always beenconsumed with the desire to visit Athens and Constantinople. The twoladies accordingly embarked on this expedition, and spent three monthsin Greece, in Turkey, in Egypt. Isabel found much to interest her inthese countries, though Madame Merle continued to remark that even amongthe most classic sites, the scenes most calculated to suggest reposeand reflexion, a certain incoherence prevailed in her. Isabel travelledrapidly and recklessly; she was like a thirsty person draining cupafter cup. Madame Merle meanwhile, as lady-in-waiting to a princesscirculating incognita, panted a little in her rear. It was on Isabel'sinvitation she had come, and she imparted all due dignity to the girl'suncountenanced state. She played her part with the tact that might havebeen expected of her, effacing herself and accepting the position of acompanion whose expenses were profusely paid. The situation, however,had no hardships, and people who met this reserved though strikingpair on their travels would not have been able to tell you whichwas patroness and which client. To say that Madame Merle improved onacquaintance 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 anintimacy of three months Isabel felt she knew her better; her characterhad revealed itself, and the admirable woman had also at last redeemedher promise of relating her history from her own point of view--aconsummation the more desirable as Isabel had already heard it relatedfrom the point of view of others. This history was so sad a one (in sofar as it concerned the late M. Merle, a positive adventurer, she mightsay, though originally so plausible, who had taken advantage, yearsbefore, of her youth and of an inexperience in which doubtless those whoknew her only now would find it difficult to believe); it abounded so instartling and lamentable incidents that her companion wondered a personso eprouvee could have kept so much of her freshness, her interest inlife. Into this freshness of Madame Merle's she obtained a considerableinsight; she seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical,carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or blanketedand bridled like the "favourite" of the jockey. She liked her as muchas 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 oncesaid 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 ofa different moral or social clime from her own, that she had grown upunder other stars.

  She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality. Of coursethe morality of civilised persons has always much in common but ouryoung woman had a sense in her of values gone wrong or, as they said atthe shops, marked down. She considered, with the presumption of youth,that a morality differing from her own must be inferior to it; and thisconviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, anoccasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a person who hadraised delicate kindness to an art and whose pride was too high forthe narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives might,in certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom indecadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine hadnot even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain;and there were evidently things in the world of which it was notadvantageous to hear. She had once or twice had a positive scare; sinceit so affected her to have to exclaim, of her friend, "Heaven forgiveher, she doesn't understand me!" Absurd as it may seem this discoveryoperated as a shock, left her with a vague dismay in which there waseven an element of foreboding. The dismay of course subsided, in thelight 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 ceasesto grow it immediately begins to decline--there being no point ofequilibrium 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 forher 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 Pyramidsin the course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among thebroken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her eyes upon the pointdesignated to her as the Strait of Salamis; deep and memorable as theseemotions had remained. She came back by the last of March from Egyptand Greece and made another stay in Rome. A few days after her arrivalGilbert Osmond descended from Florence and remained three weeks, duringwhich the fact of her being with his old friend Madame Merle, in whosehouse she had gone to lodge, made it virtually inevitable that heshould 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 longbefore, and went to pay a visit at Palazzo Crescentini, Madame Merle onthis occasion remaining in Rome. She found her aunt alone; her cousinwas still at Corfu. Ralph, however, was expected in Florence from dayto day, and Isabel, who had not seen him for upwards of a year, wasprepared to give him the most affectionate welcome.