The Portrait of a Lady [Volume 1]

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Henrietta Stackpole, who was often with her friend when Mr.
Rosier, coming to pay his compliments late in the afternoon,
expressed himself after the fashion I have sketched, usually
interrupted the young man at this point and read him a lecture on
the duties of the American citizen. She thought him most
unnatural; he was worse than poor Ralph Touchett. Henrietta,
however, was at this time more than ever addicted to fine
criticism, for her conscience had been freshly alarmed as regards
Isabel. She had not congratulated this young lady on her
augmentations and begged to be excused from doing so.

"If Mr. Touchett had consulted me about leaving you the money,"
she frankly asserted, "I'd have said to him 'Never!"

"I see," Isabel had answered. "You think it will prove a curse in
disguise. Perhaps it will."

"Leave it to some one you care less for--that's what I should
have said."

"To yourself for instance?" Isabel suggested jocosely. And then,
"Do you really believe it will ruin me?" she asked in quite
another tone.

"I hope it won't ruin you; but it will certainly confirm your
dangerous tendencies."

"Do you mean the love of luxury--of extravagance?"

"No, no," said Henrietta; "I mean your exposure on the moral
side. I approve of luxury; I think we ought to be as elegant as
possible. Look at the luxury of our western cities; I've seen
nothing over here to compare with it. I hope you'll never become
grossly sensual; but I'm not afraid of that. The peril for you is
that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You're
not enough in contact with reality--with the toiling, striving,
suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you.
You're too fastidious; you've too many graceful illusions. Your
newly-acquired thousands will shut you up more and more to the
society of a few selfish and heartless people who will be
interested in keeping them up."

Isabel's eyes expanded as she gazed at this lurid scene. "What
are my illusions?" she asked. "I try so hard not to have any."

"Well," said Henrietta, "you think you can lead a romantic life,
that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others.
You'll find you're mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put
your soul in it--to make any sort of success of it; and from the
moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it
becomes grim reality! And you can't always please yourself; you
must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you're very
ready to do; but there's another thing that's still more
important--you must often displease others. You must always be
ready for that--you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit
you at all--you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought
well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking
romantic views--that's your great illusion, my dear. But we
can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please
no one at all--not even yourself."

Isabel shook her head sadly; she looked troubled and frightened.
"This, for you, Henrietta," she said, "must be one of those
occasions!"

It was certainly true that Miss Stackpole, during her visit to
Paris, which had been professionally more remunerative than her
English sojourn, had not been living in the world of dreams. Mr.
Bantling, who had now returned to England, was her companion for
the first four weeks of her stay; and about Mr. Bantling there
was nothing dreamy. Isabel learned from her friend that the two
had led a life of great personal intimacy and that this had been
a peculiar advantage to Henrietta, owing to the gentleman's
remarkable knowledge of Paris. He had explained everything, shown
her everything, been her constant guide and interpreter. They had
breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre
together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived
together. He was a true friend, Henrietta more than once assured
our heroine; and she had never supposed that she could like any
Englishman so well. Isabel could not have told you why, but she
found something that ministered to mirth in the alliance the
correspondent of the Interviewer had struck with Lady Pensil's
brother; her amusement moreover subsisted in face of the fact
that she thought it a credit to each of them. Isabel couldn't rid
herself of a suspicion that they were playing somehow at
cross-purposes--that the simplicity of each had been entrapped.
But this simplicity was on either side none the less honourable.
It was as graceful on Henrietta's part to believe that Mr.
Bantling took an interest in the diffusion of lively journalism
and in consolidating the position of lady-correspondents as it
was on the part of his companion to suppose that the cause of the
Interviewer--a periodical of which he never formed a very
definite conception--was, if subtly analysed (a task to which Mr.
Bantling felt himself quite equal), but the cause of Miss
Stackpole's need of demonstrative affection. Each of these
groping celibates supplied at any rate a want of which the other
was impatiently conscious. Mr. Bantling, who was of rather a slow
and a discursive habit, relished a prompt, keen, positive woman,
who charmed him by the influence of a shining, challenging eye
and a kind of bandbox freshness, and who kindled a perception of
raciness in a mind to which the usual fare of life seemed
unsalted. Henrietta, on the other hand, enjoyed the society of a
gentleman who appeared somehow, in his way, made, by expensive,
roundabout, almost "quaint" processes, for her use, and whose
leisured state, though generally indefensible, was a decided
boon to a breathless mate, and who was furnished with an easy,
traditional, though by no means exhaustive, answer to almost any
social or practical question that could come up. She often found
Mr. Bantling's answers very convenient, and in the press of
catching the American post would largely and showily address them
to publicity. It was to be feared that she was indeed drifting
toward those abysses of sophistication as to which Isabel,
wishing for a good-humoured retort, had warned her. There might
be danger in store for Isabel; but it was scarcely to be hoped
that Miss Stackpole, on her side, would find permanent rest in
any adoption of the views of a class pledged to all the old
abuses. Isabel continued to warn her good-humouredly; Lady
Pensil's obliging brother was sometimes, on our heroine's lips,
an object of irreverent and facetious allusion. Nothing, however,
could exceed Henrietta's amiability on this point; she used to
abound in the sense of Isabel's irony and to enumerate with
elation the hours she had spent with this perfect man of the
world--a term that had ceased to make with her, as previously,
for opprobrium. Then, a few moments later, she would forget that
they had been talking jocosely and would mention with impulsive
earnestness some expedition she had enjoyed in his company. She
would say: "Oh, I know all about Versailles; I went there with
Mr. Bantling. I was bound to see it thoroughly--I warned him when
we went out there that I was thorough: so we spent three days at
the hotel and wandered all over the place. It was lovely weather
--a kind of Indian summer, only not so good. We just lived in
that park. Oh yes; you can't tell me anything about Versailles."
Henrietta appeared to have made arrangements to meet her gallant
friend during the spring in Italy.

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.

CHAPTER XXII

On one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr.
Touchett's death, a small group that might have been described by
a painter as composing well was gathered in one of the many rooms
of an ancient villa crowning an olive-muffled hill outside of the
Roman gate of Florence. The villa was a long, rather
blank-looking structure, with the far-projecting roof which
Tuscany loves and which, on the hills that encircle Florence,
when considered from a distance, makes so harmonious a rectangle
with the straight, dark, definite cypresses that usually rise in
groups of three or four beside it. The house had a front upon a
little grassy, empty, rural piazza which occupied a part of the
hill-top; and this front, pierced with a few windows in irregular
relations and furnished with a stone bench lengthily adjusted to
the base of the structure and useful as a lounging-place to one
or two persons wearing more or less of that air of undervalued
merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully
invests any one who confidently assumes a perfectly passive
attitude--this antique, solid, weather-worn, yet imposing front
had a somewhat incommunicative character. It was the mask, not
the face of the house. It had heavy lids, but no eyes; the house
in reality looked another way--looked off behind, into splendid
openness and the range of the afternoon light. In that quarter
the villa overhung the slope of its hill and the long valley of
the Arno, hazy with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in
the manner of a terrace, productive chiefly of tangles of wild
roses and other old stone benches, mossy and sun-warmed. The
parapet of the terrace was just the height to lean upon, and
beneath it the ground declined into the vagueness of olive-crops
and vineyards. It is not, however, with the outside of the place
that we are concerned; on this bright morning of ripened spring
its tenants had reason to prefer the shady side of the wall. The
windows of the ground-floor, as you saw them from the piazza,
were, in their noble proportions, extremely architectural; but
their function seemed less to offer communication with the world
than to defy the world to look in. They were massively
cross-barred, and placed at such a height that curiosity, even on
tiptoe, expired before it reached them. In an apartment lighted
by a row of three of these jealous apertures--one of the several
distinct apartments into which the villa was divided and which
were mainly occupied by foreigners of random race long resident
in Florence--a gentleman was seated in company with a young girl
and two good sisters from a religious house. The room was,
however, less sombre than our indications may have represented,
for it had a wide, high door, which now stood open into the
tangled garden behind; and the tall iron lattices admitted on
occasion more than enough of the Italian sunshine. It was
moreover a seat of ease, indeed of luxury, telling of
arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed,
and containing a variety of those faded hangings of damask and
tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished
oak, those angular specimens of pictorial art in frames as
pedantically primitive, those perverse-looking relics of medieval
brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite
exhausted storehouse. These things kept terms with articles of
modern furniture in which large allowance had been made for a
lounging generation; it was to be noticed that all the chairs
were deep and well padded and that much space was occupied by a
writing-table of which the ingenious perfection bore the stamp of
London and the nineteenth century. There were books in profusion
and magazines and newspapers, and a few small, odd, elaborate
pictures, chiefly in water-colour. One of these productions stood
on a drawing-room easel before which, at the moment we begin to
be concerned with her, the young girl I have mentioned had placed
herself. She was looking at the picture in silence.

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