The Portrait of A Lady (17 page)

‘‘Not till I have seen Europe!'' said Miss Stackpole. ‘‘What are you laughing at?'' she went on. ‘‘What I mean is, that Mr. Goodwood came out in the steamer with me.''

‘‘Ah!'' Isabel exclaimed, quickly.

‘‘You say that right. I had a good deal of talk with him; he has come after you.''

‘‘Did he tell you so?''

‘‘No, he told me nothing; that's how I knew it,'' said Henrietta, cleverly. ‘‘He said very little about you, but I spoke of you a good deal.''

Isabel was silent a moment. At the mention of Mr. Goodwood's name she had coloured a little, and now her blush was slowly fading.

‘‘I am very sorry you did that,'' she observed at last.

‘‘It was a pleasure to me, and I liked the way he listened. I could have talked a long time to such a listener; he was so quiet, so intense; he drank it all in.''

‘‘What did you say about me?'' Isabel asked.

‘‘I said you were on the whole the finest creature I know.''

‘‘I am very sorry for that. He thinks too well of me already; he ought not to be encouraged.''

‘‘He is dying for a little encouragement. I see his face now, and his earnest, absorbed look, while I talked. I never saw an ugly man look so handsome!''

‘‘He is very simple-minded,'' said Isabel. ‘‘And he is not so ugly.''

‘‘There is nothing so simple as a great passion.''

‘‘It is not a great passion; I am very sure it is not that.''

‘‘You don't say that as if you were sure.''

Isabel gave rather a cold smile.

‘‘I shall say it better to Mr. Goodwood himself!''

‘‘He will soon give you a chance,'' said Henrietta.

Isabel offered no answer to this assertion, which her companion made with an air of great confidence.

‘‘He will find you changed,'' the latter pursued. ‘‘You have been affected by your new surroundings.''

‘‘Very likely. I am affected by everything.''

‘‘By everything but Mr. Goodwood!'' Miss Stackpole exclaimed, with a laugh.

Isabel failed even to smile in reply; and in a moment she said: ‘‘Did he ask you to speak to me?''

‘‘Not in so many words. But his eyes asked it—and his handshake, when he bade me good-bye.''

‘‘Thank you for doing so.'' And Isabel turned away.

‘‘Yes, you are changed; you have got new ideas over here,'' her friend continued.

‘‘I hope so,'' said Isabel; ‘‘one should get as many new ideas as possible.''

‘‘Yes; but they shouldn't interfere with the old ones.''

Isabel turned about again. ‘‘If you mean that I had any idea with regard to Mr. Goodwood—'' And then she paused; Henrietta's bright eyes seemed to her to grow enormous.

‘‘My dear child, you certainly encouraged him,'' said Miss Stackpole.

Isabel appeared for the moment to be on the point of denying this charge, but instead of this she presently answered—‘‘It is very true; I did encourage him.'' And then she inquired whether her companion had learned from Mr. Goodwood what he intended to do. This inquiry was a concession to curiosity, for she did not enjoy discussing the gentleman with Henrietta Stackpole, and she thought that in her treatment of the subject this faithful friend lacked delicacy.

‘‘I asked him, and he said he meant to do nothing,'' Miss Stackpole answered. ‘‘But I don't believe that; he's not a man to do nothing. He is a man of action. Whatever happens to him, he will always do something, and whatever he does will be right.''

‘‘I quite believe that,'' said Isabel. Henrietta might be wanting in delicacy; but it touched the girl, all the same, to hear this rich assertion made.

‘‘Ah, you
do
care for him,'' Henrietta murmured.

‘‘Whatever he does will be right,'' Isabel repeated. ‘‘When a man is of that supernatural mould, what does it matter to him whether one cares for him?''

‘‘It may not matter to him, but it matters to one's self.''

‘‘Ah, what it matters to me, that is not what we are discussing,'' said Isabel, smiling a little.

This time her companion was grave. ‘‘Well, I don't care; you have changed,'' she replied. ‘‘You are not the girl you were a few short weeks ago, and Mr. Goodwood will see it. I expect him here any day.''

‘‘I hope he will hate me, then,'' said Isabel.

‘‘I believe that you hope it about as much as I believe that he is capable of it.''

To this observation our heroine made no rejoinder; she was absorbed in the feeling of alarm given her by Henrietta's intimation that Caspar Goodwood would present himself at Gardencourt. Alarm is perhaps a violent term to apply to the uneasiness with which she regarded this contingency; but her uneasiness was keen, and there were various good reasons for it. She pretended to herself that she thought the event impossible, and later, she communicated her disbelief to her friend; but for the next forty-eight hours, nevertheless, she stood prepared to hear the young man's name announced. The feeling was oppressive; it made the air sultry, as if there were to be a change of weather; and the weather, socially speaking, had been so agreeable during Isabel's stay at Gardencourt that any change would be for the worse. Her suspense, however, was dissipated on the second day. She had walked into the park, in company with the sociable Bunchie, and after strolling about for some time, in a manner at once listless and restless, had seated herself on a garden-bench, within sight of the house, beneath a spreading beech, where, in a white dress ornamented with black ribbons, she formed, among the flickering shadows, a very graceful and harmonious image. She entertained herself for some moments with talking to the little terrier, as to whom the proposal of an ownership divided with her cousin had been applied as impartially as possible—as impartially as Bunchie's own somewhat fickle and inconstant sympathies would allow. But she was notified for the first time, on this occasion, of the finite character of Bunchie's intellect; hitherto she had been mainly struck with its extent. It seemed to her at last that she would do well to take a book; formerly, when she felt heavy-hearted, she had been able, with the help of some well-chosen volume, to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason. Of late, however, it was not to be denied, literature seemed a fading light, and even after she had reminded herself that her uncle's library was provided with a complete set of those authors which no gentleman's collection should be without, she sat motionless and empty-handed, with her eyes fixed upon the cool green turf of the lawn. Her meditations were presently interrupted by the arrival of a servant, who handed her a letter. The letter bore the London postmark, and was addressed in a hand that she knew—that she seemed to know all the better, indeed, as the writer had been present to her mind when the letter was delivered. This document proved to be short, and I may give it entire.

 
Isabel read Mr. Goodwood's letter with such profound attention that she had not perceived an approaching tread on the soft grass. Looking up, however, as she mechanically folded the paper, she saw Lord Warburton standing before her.

12

SHE put the letter into her pocket, and offered her visitor a smile of welcome, exhibiting no trace of discomposure, and half surprised at her self-possession.

‘‘They told me you were out here,'' said Lord Warburton; ‘‘and as there was no one in the drawing-room, and it is really you that I wish to see, I came out with no more ado.''

Isabel had got up; she felt a wish, for the moment, that he should not sit down beside her. ‘‘I was just going indoors,'' she said.

‘‘Please don't do that; it is much pleasanter here; I have ridden over from Lockleigh; it's a lovely day.'' His smile was peculiarly friendly and pleasing, and his whole person seemed to emit that radiance of good feeling and good fare which had formed the charm of the girl's first impression of him. It surrounded him like a zone of fine June weather.

‘‘We will walk about a little, then,'' said Isabel, who could not divest herself of the sense of an intention on the part of her visitor, and who wished both to elude the intention and to satisfy her curiosity regarding it. It had flashed upon her vision once before, and it had given her on that occasion, as we know, a certain alarm. This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which were disagreeable; she had indeed spent some days in analysing them, and had succeeded in separating the pleasant part of this idea of Lord Warburton's making love to her from the painful. It may appear to some readers that the young lady was both precipitate and unduly fastidious; but the latter of these facts, if the charge be true, may serve to exonerate her from the discredit of the former. She was not eager to convince herself that a territorial magnate, as she had heard Lord Warburton called, was smitten with her charms; because a declaration from such a source would point to more questions than it would answer. She had received a strong impression of Lord Warburton's being a personage, and she had occupied herself in examining the idea. At the risk of making the reader smile, it must be said that there had been moments when the intimation that she was admired by a ‘‘personage'' struck her as an aggression which she would rather have been spared. She had never known a personage before; there were no personages in her native land. When she had thought of such matters as this, she had done so on the basis of character—of what one liked in a gentleman's mind and in his talk. She herself was a character—she could not help being aware of that; and hitherto her visions of a completed life had concerned themselves largely with moral images— things as to which the question would be whether they pleased her soul. Lord Warburton loomed up before her, largely and brightly, as a collection of attributes and powers which were not to be measured by this simple rule, but which demanded a different sort of appreciation—an appreciation which the girl, with her habit of judging quickly and freely, felt that she lacked the patience to bestow. Of course, there would be a short cut to it, and as Lord Warburton was evidently a very fine fellow, it would probably also be a safe cut. Isabel was able to say all this to herself, but she was unable to feel the force of it. What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist—it murmured to her that virtually she had a system and an orbit of her own. It told her other things besides—things which both contradicted and confirmed each other; that a girl might do much worse than trust herself to such a man as Lord Warburton, and that it would be very interesting to see something of his system from his own point of view; that, on the other hand, however, there was evidently a great deal of it which she should regard only as an encumbrance, and that even in the whole there was something heavy and rigid which would make it unacceptable. Furthermore, there was a young man lately come from America who had no system at all; but who had a character of which it was useless for her to try to persuade herself that the impression on her mind had been light. The letter that she carried in her pocket sufficiently reminded her of the contrary. Smile not, however, I venture to repeat, at this simple young lady from Albany, who debated whether she should accept an English peer before he had offered himself, and who was disposed to believe that on the whole she could do better. She was a person of great good faith, and if there was a great deal of folly in her wisdom, those who judge her severely may have the satisfaction of finding that, later, she became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly which will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity.

Lord Warburton seemed quite ready to walk, to sit, or to do anything that Isabel should propose, and he gave her this assurance with his usual air of being particularly pleased to exercise a social virtue. But he was, nevertheless, not in command of his emotions, and as he strolled beside her for a moment, in silence, looking at her without letting her know it, there was something embarrassed in his glance and his misdirected laughter. Yes, assuredly—as we have touched on the point, we may return to it for a moment again—the English are the most romantic people in the world, and Lord Warburton was about to give an example of it. He was about to take a step which would astonish all his friends and displease a great many of them, and which, superficially, had nothing to recommend it. The young lady who trod the turf beside him had come from a queer country across the sea, which he knew a good deal about; her antecedents, her associations, were very vague to his mind, except in so far as they were generic, and in this sense they revealed themselves with a certain vividness. Miss Archer had neither a fortune nor the sort of beauty that justifies a man to the multitude, and he calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He had summed up all this—the perversity of the impulse, which had declined to avail itself of the most liberal opportunities to subside, and the judgement of mankind, as exemplified particularly in the more quickly judging half of it; he had looked these things well in the face, and then he had dismissed them from his thoughts. He cared no more for them than for the rosebud in his button-hole. It is the good fortune of a man who for the greater part of a lifetime has abstained without effort from making himself disagreeable to his friends, that when the need comes for such a course it is not discredited by irritating associations.