The Portrait of a Lady [Volume 1]

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"I'm not bent on a life of misery," said Isabel. "I've always
been intensely determined to be happy, and I've often believed I
should be. I've told people that; you can ask them. But it comes
over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any
extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself."

"By separating yourself from what?"

"From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most
people know and suffer."

Lord Warburton broke into a smile that almost denoted hope. "Why,
my dear Miss Archer," he began to explain with the most
considerate eagerness, "I don't offer you any exoneration from
life or from any chances or dangers whatever. I wish I could;
depend upon it I would! For what do you take me, pray? Heaven
help me, I'm not the Emperor of China! All I offer you is the
chance of taking the common lot in a comfortable sort of way. The
common lot? Why, I'm devoted to the common lot! Strike an
alliance with me, and I promise you that you shall have plenty of
it. You shall separate from nothing whatever--not even from your
friend Miss Stackpole."

"She'd never approve of it," said Isabel, trying to smile and
take advantage of this side-issue; despising herself too, not a
little, for doing so.

"Are we speaking of Miss Stackpole?" his lordship asked
impatiently. "I never saw a person judge things on such theoretic
grounds."

"Now I suppose you're speaking of me," said Isabel with humility;
and she turned away again, for she saw Miss Molyneux enter the
gallery, accompanied by Henrietta and by Ralph.

Lord Warburton's sister addressed him with a certain timidity and
reminded him she ought to return home in time for tea, as she was
expecting company to partake of it. He made no answer--apparently
not having heard her; he was preoccupied, and with good reason.
Miss Molyneux--as if he had been Royalty--stood like a
lady-in-waiting.

"Well, I never, Miss Molyneux!" said Henrietta Stackpole. "If I
wanted to go he'd have to go. If I wanted my brother to do a
thing he'd have to do it."

"Oh, Warburton does everything one wants," Miss Molyneux answered
with a quick, shy laugh. "How very many pictures you have!" she
went on, turning to Ralph.

"They look a good many, because they're all put together," said
Ralph. "But it's really a bad way."

"Oh, I think it's so nice. I wish we had a gallery at Lockleigh.
I'm so very fond of pictures," Miss Molyneux went on, persistently,
to Ralph, as if she were afraid Miss Stackpole would address her
again. Henrietta appeared at once to fascinate and to frighten her.

"Ah yes, pictures are very convenient," said Ralph, who appeared
to know better what style of reflexion was acceptable to her.

"They're so very pleasant when it rains," the young lady
continued. "It has rained of late so very often."

"I'm sorry you're going away, Lord Warburton," said Henrietta. "I
wanted to get a great deal more out of you."

"I'm not going away," Lord Warburton answered.

"Your sister says you must. In America the gentlemen obey the
ladies."

"I'm afraid we have some people to tea," said Miss Molyneux,
looking at her brother.

"Very good, my dear. We'll go."

"I hoped you would resist!" Henrietta exclaimed. "I wanted to see
what Miss Molyneux would do."

"I never do anything," said this young lady.

"I suppose in your position it's sufficient for you to exist!"
Miss Stackpole returned. "I should like very much to see you at
home."

"You must come to Lockleigh again," said Miss Molyneux, very
sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel's friend.
Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment
seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything
she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton--the peace, the
kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a
great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux and then she said: "I'm
afraid I can never come again."

"Never again?"

"I'm afraid I'm going away."

"Oh, I'm so very sorry," said Miss Molyneux. "I think that's so
very wrong of you."

Lord Warburton watched this little passage; then he turned away
and stared at a picture. Ralph, leaning against the rail before
the picture with his hands in his pockets, had for the moment
been watching him.

"I should like to see you at home," said Henrietta, whom Lord
Warburton found beside him. "I should like an hour's talk with
you; there are a great many questions I wish to ask you."

"I shall be delighted to see you," the proprietor of Lockleigh
answered; "but I'm certain not to be able to answer many of your
questions. When will you come?"

"Whenever Miss Archer will take me. We're thinking of going to
London, but we'll go and see you first. I'm determined to get
some satisfaction out of you."

"If it depends upon Miss Archer I'm afraid you won't get much.
She won't come to Lockleigh; she doesn't like the place."

"She told me it was lovely!" said Henrietta.

Lord Warburton hesitated. "She won't come, all the same. You had
better come alone," he added.

Henrietta straightened herself, and her large eyes expanded.
"Would you make that remark to an English lady?" she enquired
with soft asperity.

Lord Warburton stared. "Yes, if I liked her enough."

"You'd be careful not to like her enough. If Miss Archer won't
visit your place again it's because she doesn't want to take me.
I know what she thinks of me, and I suppose you think the same--
that I oughtn't to bring in individuals." Lord Warburton was at a
loss; he had not been made acquainted with Miss Stackpole's
professional character and failed to catch her allusion. "Miss
Archer has been warning you!" she therefore went on.

"Warning me?"

"Isn't that why she came off alone with you here--to put you on
your guard?"

"Oh dear, no," said Lord Warburton brazenly; "our talk had no
such solemn character as that."

"Well, you've been on your guard--intensely. I suppose it's
natural to you; that's just what I wanted to observe. And so,
too, Miss Molyneux--she wouldn't commit herself. You have been
warned, anyway," Henrietta continued, addressing this young lady;
"but for you it wasn't necessary."

"I hope not," said Miss Molyneux vaguely.

"Miss Stackpole takes notes," Ralph soothingly explained. "She's
a great satirist; she sees through us all and she works us up."

"Well, I must say I never have had such a collection of bad
material!" Henrietta declared, looking from Isabel to Lord
Warburton and from this nobleman to his sister and to Ralph.
"There's something the matter with you all; you're as dismal as
if you had got a bad cable."

"You do see through us, Miss Stackpole," said Ralph in a low
tone, giving her a little intelligent nod as he led the party out
of the gallery. "There's something the matter with us all."

Isabel came behind these two; Miss Molyneux, who decidedly liked
her immensely, had taken her arm, to walk beside her over the
polished floor. Lord Warburton strolled on the other side with
his hands behind him and his eyes lowered. For some moments he
said nothing; and then, "Is it true you're going to London?" he
asked.

"I believe it has been arranged."

"And when shall you come back?"

"In a few days; but probably for a very short time. I'm going to
Paris with my aunt."

"When, then, shall I see you again?"

"Not for a good while," said Isabel. "But some day or other, I
hope."

"Do you really hope it?"

"Very much."

He went a few steps in silence; then he stopped and put out his
hand. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Isabel.

Miss Molyneux kissed her again, and she let the two depart. After
it, without rejoining Henrietta and Ralph, she retreated to her
own room; in which apartment, before dinner, she was found by
Mrs. Touchett, who had stopped on her way to the salon. "I may
as well tell you," said that lady, "that your uncle has informed
me of your relations with Lord Warburton."

Isabel considered. "Relations? They're hardly relations. That's
the strange part of it: he has seen me but three or four times."

"Why did you tell your uncle rather than me?" Mrs. Touchett
dispassionately asked.

Again the girl hesitated. "Because he knows Lord Warburton
better."

"Yes, but I know you better."

"I'm not sure of that," said Isabel, smiling.

"Neither am I, after all; especially when you give me that rather
conceited look. One would think you were awfully pleased with
yourself and had carried off a prize! I suppose that when you
refuse an offer like Lord Warburton's it's because you expect to
do something better."

"Ah, my uncle didn't say that!" cried Isabel, smiling still.

CHAPTER XV

It had been arranged that the two young ladies should proceed to
London under Ralph's escort, though Mrs. Touchett looked with
little favour on the plan. It was just the sort of plan, she
said, that Miss Stackpole would be sure to suggest, and she
enquired if the correspondent of the Interviewer was to take the
party to stay at her favourite boarding-house.

"I don't care where she takes us to stay, so long as there's
local colour," said Isabel. "That's what we're going to London
for."

"I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may
do anything," her aunt rejoined. "After that one needn't stand on
trifles."

"Should you have liked me to marry Lord Warburton?" Isabel
enquired.

"Of course I should."

"I thought you disliked the English so much."

"So I do; but it's all the greater reason for making use of
them."

"Is that your idea of marriage?" And Isabel ventured to add that
her aunt appeared to her to have made very little use of Mr.
Touchett.

"Your uncle's not an English nobleman," said Mrs. Touchett,
"though even if he had been I should still probably have taken up
my residence in Florence."

"Do you think Lord Warburton could make me any better than I am?"
the girl asked with some animation. "I don't mean I'm too good to
improve. I mean that I don't love Lord Warburton enough to marry
him."

"You did right to refuse him then," said Mrs. Touchett in her
smallest, sparest voice. "Only, the next great offer you get, I
hope you'll manage to come up to your standard."

"We had better wait till the offer comes before we talk about it.
I hope very much I may have no more offers for the present. They
upset me completely."

"You probably won't be troubled with them if you adopt
permanently the Bohemian manner of life. However, I've promised
Ralph not to criticise."

"I'll do whatever Ralph says is right," Isabel returned. "I've
unbounded confidence in Ralph."

"His mother's much obliged to you!" this lady dryly laughed.

"It seems to me indeed she ought to feel it!" Isabel
irrepressibly answered.

Ralph had assured her that there would be no violation of decency
in their paying a visit--the little party of three--to the sights
of the metropolis; but Mrs. Touchett took a different view. Like
many ladies of her country who had lived a long time in Europe,
she had completely lost her native tact on such points, and in
her reaction, not in itself deplorable, against the liberty
allowed to young persons beyond the seas, had fallen into
gratuitous and exaggerated scruples. Ralph accompanied their
visitors to town and established them at a quiet inn in a street
that ran at right angles to Piccadilly. His first idea had been
to take them to his father's house in Winchester Square, a large,
dull mansion which at this period of the year was shrouded in
silence and brown holland; but he bethought himself that, the
cook being at Gardencourt, there was no one in the house to get
them their meals, and Pratt's Hotel accordingly became their
resting-place. Ralph, on his side, found quarters in Winchester
Square, having a "den" there of which he was very fond and being
familiar with deeper fears than that of a cold kitchen. He
availed himself largely indeed of the resources of Pratt's Hotel,
beginning his day with an early visit to his fellow travellers,
who had Mr. Pratt in person, in a large bulging white waistcoat,
to remove their dish-covers. Ralph turned up, as he said, after
breakfast, and the little party made out a scheme of
entertainment for the day. As London wears in the month of
September a face blank but for its smears of prior service, the
young man, who occasionally took an apologetic tone, was obliged
to remind his companion, to Miss Stackpole's high derision, that
there wasn't a creature in town.

"I suppose you mean the aristocracy are absent," Henrietta
answered; "but I don't think you could have a better proof that
if they were absent altogether they wouldn't be missed. It seems
to me the place is about as full as it can be. There's no one
here, of course, but three or four millions of people. What is it
you call them--the lower-middle class? They're only the
population of London, and that's of no consequence."

Ralph declared that for him the aristocracy left no void that
Miss Stackpole herself didn't fill, and that a more contented man
was nowhere at that moment to be found. In this he spoke the
truth, for the stale September days, in the huge half-empty town,
had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in
a dusty cloth. When he went home at night to the empty house in
Winchester Square, after a chain of hours with his comparatively
ardent friends, he wandered into the big dusky dining-room, where
the candle he took from the hall-table, after letting himself in,
constituted the only illumination. The square was still, the
house was still; when he raised one of the windows of the
dining-room to let in the air he heard the slow creak of the
boots of a lone constable. His own step, in the empty place,
seemed loud and sonorous; some of the carpets had been raised,
and whenever he moved he roused a melancholy echo. He sat down in
one of the armchairs; the big dark dining table twinkled here and
there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of
them very brown, looked vague and incoherent. There was a ghostly
presence as of dinners long since digested, of table-talk that
had lost its actuality. This hint of the supernatural perhaps had
something to do with the fact that his imagination took a flight
and that he remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at
which he should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading
the evening paper. I say he did nothing, and I maintain the
phrase in the face of the fact that he thought at these moments
of Isabel. To think of Isabel could only be for him an idle
pursuit, leading to nothing and profiting little to any one. His
cousin had not yet seemed to him so charming as during these days
spent in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps and shallows of the
metropolitan element. Isabel was full of premises, conclusions,
emotions; if she had come in search of local colour she found it
everywhere. She asked more questions than he could answer, and
launched brave theories, as to historic cause and social effect,
that he was equally unable to accept or to refute. The party went
more than once to the British Museum and to that brighter palace
of art which reclaims for antique variety so large an area of a
monotonous suburb; they spent a morning in the Abbey and went on
a penny-steamer to the Tower; they looked at pictures both in
public and private collections and sat on various occasions
beneath the great trees in Kensington Gardens. Henrietta proved
an indestructible sight-seer and a more lenient judge than Ralph
had ventured to hope. She had indeed many disappointments, and
London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of the strong
points of the American civic idea; but she made the best of its
dingy dignities and only heaved an occasional sigh and uttered a
desultory "Well!" which led no further and lost itself in
retrospect. The truth was that, as she said herself, she was not
in her element. "I've not a sympathy with inanimate objects," she
remarked to Isabel at the National Gallery; and she continued to
suffer from the meagreness of the glimpse that had as yet been
vouchsafed to her of the inner life. Landscapes by Turner and
Assyrian bulls were a poor substitute for the literary
dinner-parties at which she had hoped to meet the genius and
renown of Great Britain.

"Where are your public men, where are your men and women of
intellect?" she enquired of Ralph, standing in the middle of
Trafalgar Square as if she had supposed this to be a place where
she would naturally meet a few. "That's one of them on the top of
the column, you say--Lord Nelson. Was he a lord too? Wasn't he
high enough, that they had to stick him a hundred feet in the
air? That's the past--I don't care about the past; I want to see
some of the leading minds of the present. I won't say of the
future, because I don't believe much in your future." Poor Ralph
had few leading minds among his acquaintance and rarely enjoyed
the pleasure of buttonholing a celebrity; a state of things which
appeared to Miss Stackpole to indicate a deplorable want of
enterprise. "If I were on the other side I should call," she
said, "and tell the gentleman, whoever he might be, that I had
heard a great deal about him and had come to see for myself. But
I gather from what you say that this is not the custom here. You
seem to have plenty of meaningless customs, but none of those
that would help along. We are in advance, certainly. I suppose I
shall have to give up the social side altogether;" and Henrietta,
though she went about with her guidebook and pencil and wrote a
letter to the Interviewer about the Tower (in which she described
the execution of Lady Jane Grey), had a sad sense of falling
below her mission.

The incident that had preceded Isabel's departure from
Gardencourt left a painful trace in our young woman's mind: when
she felt again in her face, as from a recurrent wave, the cold
breath of her last suitor's surprise, she could only muffle her
head till the air cleared. She could not have done less than what
she did; this was certainly true. But her necessity, all the
same, had been as graceless as some physical act in a strained
attitude, and she felt no desire to take credit for her conduct.
Mixed with this imperfect pride, nevertheless, was a feeling of
freedom which in itself was sweet and which, as she wandered
through the great city with her ill-matched companions,
occasionally throbbed into odd demonstrations. When she walked in
Kensington Gardens she stopped the children (mainly of the poorer
sort) whom she saw playing on the grass; she asked them their
names and gave them sixpence and, when they were pretty, kissed
them. Ralph noticed these quaint charities; he noticed everything
she did. One afternoon, that his companions might pass the time,
he invited them to tea in Winchester Square, and he had the house
set in order as much as possible for their visit. There was
another guest to meet them, an amiable bachelor, an old friend of
Ralph's who happened to be in town and for whom prompt commerce
with Miss Stackpole appeared to have neither difficulty nor
dread. Mr. Bantling, a stout, sleek, smiling man of forty,
wonderfully dressed, universally informed and incoherently
amused, laughed immoderately at everything Henrietta said, gave
her several cups of tea, examined in her society the bric-a-brac,
of which Ralph had a considerable collection, and afterwards,
when the host proposed they should go out into the square and
pretend it was a fete-champetre, walked round the limited
enclosure several times with her and, at a dozen turns of their
talk, bounded responsive--as with a positive passion for
argument--to her remarks upon the inner life.

"Oh, I see; I dare say you found it very quiet at Gardencourt.
Naturally there's not much going on there when there's such a lot
of illness about. Touchett's very bad, you know; the doctors have
forbidden his being in England at all, and he has only come back
to take care of his father. The old man, I believe, has half a
dozen things the matter with him. They call it gout, but to my
certain knowledge he has organic disease so developed that you
may depend upon it he'll go, some day soon, quite quickly. Of
course that sort of thing makes a dreadfully dull house; I wonder
they have people when they can do so little for them. Then I
believe Mr. Touchett's always squabbling with his wife; she lives
away from her husband, you know, in that extraordinary American
way of yours. If you want a house where there's always something
going on, I recommend you to go down and stay with my sister,
Lady Pensil, in Bedfordshire. I'll write to her to-morrow and I'm
sure she'll be delighted to ask you. I know just what you want--
you want a house where they go in for theatricals and picnics and
that sort of thing. My sister's just that sort of woman; she's
always getting up something or other and she's always glad to
have the sort of people who help her. I'm sure she'll ask you
down by return of post: she's tremendously fond of distinguished
people and writers. She writes herself, you know; but I haven't
read everything she has written. It's usually poetry, and I don't
go in much for poetry--unless it's Byron. I suppose you think a
great deal of Byron in America," Mr. Bantling continued, expanding
in the stimulating air of Miss Stackpole's attention, bringing up
his sequences promptly and changing his topic with an easy turn
of hand. Yet he none the less gracefully kept in sight of the
idea, dazzling to Henrietta, of her going to stay with Lady
Pensil in Bedfordshire. "I understand what you want; you want to
see some genuine English sport. The Touchetts aren't English at
all, you know; they have their own habits, their own language,
their own food--some odd religion even, I believe, of their own.
The old man thinks it's wicked to hunt, I'm told. You must get
down to my sister's in time for the theatricals, and I'm sure
she'll be glad to give you a part. I'm sure you act well; I
know you're very clever. My sister's forty years old and has
seven children, but she's going to play the principal part. Plain
as she is she makes up awfully well--I will say for her. Of
course you needn't act if you don't want to."

In this manner Mr. Bantling delivered himself while they strolled
over the grass in Winchester Square, which, although it had been
peppered by the London soot, invited the tread to linger.
Henrietta thought her blooming, easy-voiced bachelor, with his
impressibility to feminine merit and his splendid range of
suggestion, a very agreeable man, and she valued the opportunity
he offered her. "I don't know but I would go, if your sister
should ask me. I think it would be my duty. What do you call her
name?"

"Pensil. It's an odd name, but it isn't a bad one."

"I think one name's as good as another. But what's her rank?".

"Oh, she's a baron's wife; a convenient sort of rank. You're fine
enough and you're not too fine."

"I don't know but what she'd be too fine for me. What do you call
the place she lives in--Bedfordshire?"

"She lives away in the northern corner of it. It's a tiresome
country, but I dare say you won't mind it. I'll try and run down
while you're there."

All this was very pleasant to Miss Stackpole, and she was sorry
to be obliged to separate from Lady Pensil's obliging brother.
But it happened that she had met the day before, in Piccadilly,
some friends whom she had not seen for a year: the Miss Climbers,
two ladies from Wilmington, Delaware, who had been travelling on
the Continent and were now preparing to re-embark. Henrietta had
had a long interview with them on the Piccadilly pavement, and
though the three ladies all talked at once they had not exhausted
their store. It had been agreed therefore that Henrietta should
come and dine with them in their lodgings in Jermyn Street at six
o'clock on the morrow, and she now bethought herself of this
engagement. She prepared to start for Jermyn Street, taking leave
first of Ralph Touchett and Isabel, who, seated on garden chairs
in another part of the enclosure, were occupied--if the term may
be used--with an exchange of amenities less pointed than the
practical colloquy of Miss Stackpole and Mr. Bantling. When it
had been settled between Isabel and her friend that they should
be reunited at some reputable hour at Pratt's Hotel, Ralph
remarked that the latter must have a cab. She couldn't walk all
the way to Jermyn Street.

"I suppose you mean it's improper for me to walk alone!"
Henrietta exclaimed. "Merciful powers, have I come to this?"

"There's not the slightest need of your walking alone," Mr.
Bantling gaily interposed. "I should be greatly pleased to go
with you."

"I simply meant that you'd be late for dinner," Ralph returned.
"Those poor ladies may easily believe that we refuse, at the
last, to spare you."

"You had better have a hansom, Henrietta," said Isabel.

"I'll get you a hansom if you'll trust me," Mr. Bantling went on.

"We might walk a little till we meet one."

"I don't see why I shouldn't trust him, do you?" Henrietta
enquired of Isabel.

"I don't see what Mr. Bantling could do to you," Isabel
obligingly answered; "but, if you like, we'll walk with you till
you find your cab."

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