The Portrait of A Lady (23 page)

‘‘Your uncle is 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 that I am too good to improve. I mean— 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 little spare voice. ‘‘Only, the next great offer you get, I hope you will manage to come up to your standard.''

‘‘We had better wait till the offer comes, before we talk about it. I hope very much that I may have no more offers for the present. They bother me fearfully.''

‘‘You probably won't be troubled with them if you adopt permanently the Bohemian manner of life. However, I have promised Ralph not to criticize the affair.''

‘‘I will do whatever Ralph says is right,'' Isabel said. ‘‘I have unbounded confidence in Ralph.''

‘‘His mother is much obliged to you!'' cried this lady, with a laugh.

‘‘It seems to me she ought to be,'' Isabel rejoined, smiling.

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 have 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 the two young ladies 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 not being dependent on the local
cuisine.
He availed himself largely indeed of that 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 does not wear in the month of September its most brilliant face, the young man, who occasionally took an apologetic tone, was obliged to remind his companion, to Miss Stackpole's high irritation, that there was not a creature in town.

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

Ralph declared that for him the aristocracy left no void that Miss Stackpole herself did not 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, borrowed a charm from his circumstances. When he went home at night to the empty house in Winchester Square, after a day spent with his inquisitive countrywomen, 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 solitary policeman. His own steps, in the empty room, 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 arm-chairs; the big, dark, dining-table twinkled here and there in the small candlelight; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent. There was a ghostly presence in the room, 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 Ralph's 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 Ralph 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 constantly interested and often excited; if she had come in search of local colour she found it everywhere. She asked more questions than he could answer, and launched little theories 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 Stackpole proved to be an indefatigable sight-seer and a more good-natured critic than Ralph had ventured to hope. She had indeed many disappointments, and London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of many of the cities of her native land; but she made the best of its dingy peculiarities 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 have 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 inquired 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, and none of those that one really wants. 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 guide-book and pencil, and wrote a letter to the
Interviewer
about the Tower (in which she described the execution of Lady Jane Grey), had a depressing sense of falling below her own standard.

The incident which had preceded Isabel's departure from Gardencourt left a painful trace in the girl's mind; she took no pleasure in recalling Lord Warburton's magnanimous disappointment. She could not have done less than what she did; this was certainly true. But her necessity, all the same, had been a distasteful one, and she felt no desire to take credit for her conduct. Nevertheless, mingled with this absence of an intellectual relish of it, 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 joyous excitement. 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 she kissed them. Ralph noticed such incidents; he noticed everything that Isabel did.

One afternoon, by way of amusing his companions, he invited them to tea in Winchester Square, and he had the house set in order as much as possible, to do honour to their visit. There was another guest, also, to meet the ladies, an amiable bachelor, an old friend of Ralph's, who happened to be in town, and who got on uncommonly well with Miss Stackpole. Mr. Bantling, a stout, fair, smiling man of forty, who was extraordinarily well dressed, and whose contributions to the conversation were characterized by vivacity rather than continuity, laughed immoderately at everything Henrietta said, gave her several cups of tea, examined in her society the
bric-à-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
fȇte-champȇtre,
walked round the limited enclosure several times with her and listened with candid interest to her remarks upon the inner life.

‘‘Oh, I see,'' said Mr. Bantling; ‘‘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 forbid 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 is dropsical as well, though he doesn't look it. You may depend upon it he has got a lot of water somewhere. Of course that sort of thing makes it awfully slow for people in the house; I wonder they have them under such circumstances. Then I believe Mr. Touchett is 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 is 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 am 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 is just that sort of woman; she is always getting up something or other, and she is always glad to have the sort of people that help her. I am sure she'll ask you down by return of post; she is 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 at last changing his topic, with a natural eagerness to provide suitable conversation for so remarkable a woman. He returned, however, ultimately to the idea of Henrietta's going to stay with Lady Pensil in Bedfordshire. ‘‘I understand what you want,'' he repeated; ‘‘you want to see some genuine English sport. The Touchetts are not English at all, you know; they live on a kind of foreign system; they have got some awfully queer ideas. The old man thinks it's wicked to hunt, I am told. You must get down to my sister's in time for the theatricals, and I am sure she will be glad to give you a part. I am sure you act well; I know you are very clever. My sister is forty years old, and she has seven children; but she is going to play the principal part. 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 suggestiveness of allusion, 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,'' she said. ‘‘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 is as good as another. But what is her rank?''

‘‘Oh, she's a baron's wife; a convenient sort of rank. You are fine enough, and you are 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 are 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 a long interview with them on the Piccadilly pavement, and though the three ladies all talked at once, they had not exhausted their accumulated topics. 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 could not walk all the way to Jermyn Street.