The Portrait of A Lady (30 page)

Ralph leaned back in his chair, with folded arms; his eyes were fixed for some time in meditation. At last, with the air of a man fairly mustering courage—‘‘I take a great interest in my cousin,'' he said, ‘‘but not the sort of interest you desire. I shall not live many years; but I hope I shall live long enough to see what she does with herself. She is entirely independent of me; I can exercise very little influence upon her life. But I should like to do something for her.''

‘‘What should you like to do?''

‘‘I should like to put a little wind in her sails.''

‘‘What do you mean by that?''

‘‘I should like to put it into her power to do some of the things she wants. She wants to see the world, for instance. I should like to put money in her purse.''

‘‘Ah, I am glad you have thought of that,'' said the old man. ‘‘But I have thought of it too. I have left her a legacy—five thousand pounds.''

‘‘That is capital; it is very kind of you. But I should like to do a little more.''

Something of that veiled acuteness with which it had been, on Daniel Touchett's part, the habit of a lifetime to listen to a financial proposition still lingered in the face in which the invalid had not obliterated the man of business. ‘‘I shall be happy to consider it,'' he said, softly.

‘‘Isabel is poor, then. My mother tells me that she has but a few hundred dollars a year. I should like to make her rich.''

‘‘What do you mean by rich?''

‘‘I call people rich when they are able to gratify their imagination. Isabel has a great deal of imagination.''

‘‘So have you, my son,'' said Mr. Touchett, listening very attentively, but a little confusedly.

‘‘You tell me I shall have money enough for two. What I want is that you should kindly relieve me of my superfluity and give it to Isabel. Divide my inheritance into two equal halves, and give the second half to her.''

‘‘To do what she likes with?''

‘‘Absolutely what she likes.''

‘‘And without an equivalent?''

‘‘What equivalent could there be?''

‘‘The one I have already mentioned.''

‘‘Her marrying—some one or other? It's just to do away with anything of that sort that I make my suggestion. If she has an easy income she will never have to marry for a support. She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free.''

‘‘Well, you seem to have thought it out,'' said Mr. Touchett. ‘‘But I don't see why you appeal to me. The money will be yours, and you can easily give it to her yourself.''

Ralph started a little. ‘‘Ah, dear father,
I
can't offer Isabel money!''

The old man gave a groan. ‘‘Don't tell me you are not in love with her! Do you want me to have the credit of it?''

‘‘Entirely. I should like it simply to be a clause in your will, without the slightest reference to me.''

‘‘Do you want me to make a new will, then?''

‘‘A few words will do it; you can attend to it the next time you feel a little lively.''

‘‘You must telegraph to Mr. Hilary, then. I will do nothing without my solicitor.''

‘‘You shall see Mr. Hilary to-morrow.''

‘‘He will think we have quarrelled, you and I,'' said the old man.

‘‘Very probably; I shall like him to think it,'' said Ralph, smiling; ‘‘and to carry out the idea, I give you notice that I shall be very sharp with you.''

The humour of this appeared to touch his father; he lay a little while taking it in.

‘‘I will do anything you like,'' he said at last; ‘‘but I'm not sure it's right. You say you want to put wind in her sails; but aren't you afraid of putting too much?''

‘‘I should like to see her going before the breeze!'' Ralph answered.

‘‘You speak as if it were for your entertainment.''

‘‘So it is, a good deal.''

‘‘Well, I don't think I understand,'' said Mr. Touchett, with a sigh. ‘‘Young men are very different from what I was. When I cared for a girl—when I was young—I wanted to do more than look at her. You have scruples that I shouldn't have had, and you have ideas that I shouldn't have had either. You say that Isabel wants to be free, and that her being rich will keep her from marrying for money. Do you think that she is a girl to do that?''

‘‘By no means. But she has less money than she has ever had before; her father gave her everything, because he used to spend his capital. She has nothing but the crumbs of that feast to live on, and she doesn't really know how meagre they are—she has yet to learn it. My mother has told me all about it. Isabel will learn it when she is really thrown upon the world, and it would be very painful to me to think of her coming to the consciousness of a lot of wants that she should be unable to satisfy.''

‘‘I have left her five thousand pounds. She can satisfy a good many wants with that.''

‘‘She can indeed. But she would probably spend it in two or three years.''

‘‘You think she would be extravagant then?''

‘‘Most certainly,'' said Ralph, smiling serenely.

Poor Mr. Touchett's acuteness was rapidly giving place to pure confusion. ‘‘It would merely be a question of time, then, her spending the larger sum?''

‘‘No, at first I think she would plunge into that pretty freely; she would probably make over a part of it to each of her sisters. But after that she would come to her senses, remember that she had still a lifetime before her, and live within her means.''

‘‘Well, you
have
worked it out,'' said the old man, with a sigh. ‘‘You do take an interest in her, certainly.''

‘‘You can't consistently say I go too far. You wished me to go further.''

‘‘Well, I don't know,'' the old man answered. ‘‘I don't think I enter into your spirit. It seems to me immoral.''

‘‘Immoral, dear daddy?''

‘‘Well, I don't know that it's right to make everything so easy for a person.''

‘‘It surely depends upon the person. When the person is good, your making things easy is all to the credit of virtue. To facilitate the execution of good impulses, what can be a nobler act?''

This was a little difficult to follow, and Mr. Touchett considered it for a while. At last he said: ‘‘Isabel is a sweet young girl; but do you think she is as good as that?''

‘‘She is as good as her best opportunities,'' said Ralph.

‘‘Well,'' Mr. Touchett declared, ‘‘she ought to get a great many opportunities for sixty thousand pounds.''

‘‘I have no doubt she will.''

‘‘Of course I will do what you want,'' said the old man. ‘‘I only want to understand it a little.''

‘‘Well, dear daddy, don't you understand it now?'' his son asked, caressingly. ‘‘If you don't, we won't take any more trouble about it; we will leave it alone.''

Mr. Touchett lay silent a long time. Ralph supposed that he had given up the attempt to understand it. But at last he began again: ‘‘Tell me this first. Doesn't it occur to you that a young lady with sixty thousand pounds may fall a victim to the fortune-hunters?''

‘‘She will hardly fall a victim to more than one.''

‘‘Well, one is too many.''

‘‘Decidedly. That's a risk, and it has entered into my calculation. I think it's appreciable, but I think it's small, and I am prepared to take it.''

Poor Mr. Touchett's acuteness had passed into perplexity, and his perplexity now passed into admiration.

‘‘Well, you
have
gone into it!'' he exclaimed. ‘‘But I don't see what good you are to get of it.''

Ralph leaned over his father's pillows and gently smoothed them; he was aware that their conversation had been prolonged to a dangerous point. ‘‘I shall get just the good that I said just now I wished to put into Isabel's reach—that of having gratified my imagination. But it's scandalous, the way I have taken advantage of you!''

19

AS MRS. TOUCHETT had foretold, Isabel and Madame Merle were thrown much together during the illness of their host, and if they had not become intimate it would have been almost a breach of good manners. Their manners were of the best; but in addition to this they happened to please each other. It is perhaps too much to say that they swore an eternal friendship; but tacitly, at least, they called the future to witness. Isabel did so with a perfectly good conscience, although she would have hesitated to admit that she was intimate with her new friend in the sense which she privately attached to this term. She often wondered, indeed, whether she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with any one. She had an ideal of friendship, as well as of several other sentiments, and it did not seem to her in this case—it had not seemed to her in other cases—that the actual completely expressed it. But she often reminded herself that there were essential reasons why one's ideal could not become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see—a matter of faith, not of experience. Experience, however, might supply us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these. Certainly, on the whole, Isabel had never encountered a more agreeable and interesting woman than Madame Merle; she had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship—the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one's own personality. The gates of the girl's confidence were opened wider than they had ever been; she said things to Madame Merle that she had not yet said to any one. Sometimes she took alarm at her candour; it was as if she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of jewels. These spiritual gems were the only ones of any magnitude that Isabel possessed; but that was all the greater reason why they should be carefully guarded. Afterwards, however, the girl always said to herself that one should never regret a generous error, and that if Madame Merle had not the merits she attributed to her, so much the worse for Madame Merle. There was no doubt she had great merits—she was a charming, sympathetic, intelligent, cultivated woman. More than this (for it had not been Isabel's ill fortune to go through life without meeting several persons of her own sex, of whom no less could fairly be said), she was rare, she was superior, she was pre-eminent. There are a great many amiable people in the world, and Madame Merle was far from being vulgarly good-natured and restlessly witty. She knew how to think—an accomplishment rare in women; and she had thought to very good purpose. Of course, too, she knew how to feel; Isabel could not have spent a week with her without being sure of that. This was, indeed, Madame Merle's great talent, her most perfect gift. Life had told upon her; she had felt it strongly, and it was part of the satisfaction that Isabel found in her society that when the girl talked of what she was pleased to call serious matters, her companion understood her so easily and quickly. Emotion, it is true, had become with her rather historic; she made no secret of the fact that the fountain of sentiment, thanks to having been rather violently tapped at one period, did not flow quite so freely as of yore. Her pleasure was now to judge rather than to feel; she freely admitted that of old she had been rather foolish, and now she pretended to be wise.

‘‘I judge more than I used to,'' she said to Isabel; ‘‘but it seems to me that I have earned the right. One can't judge till one is forty; before that we are too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition too ignorant. I am sorry for you; it will be a long time before you are forty. But every gain is a loss of some kind; I often think that after forty one can't really feel. The freshness, the quickness have certainly gone. You will keep them longer than most people; it will be a great satisfaction to me to see you some years hence. I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain—it can't spoil you. It may pull you about horribly; but I defy it to break you up.''

Isabel received this assurance as a young soldier, still panting from a slight skirmish in which he has come off with honour, might receive a pat on the shoulder from his colonel. Like such a recognition of merit, it seemed to come with authority. How could the lightest word do less, of a person who was prepared to say, of almost everything Isabel told her—‘‘Oh, I have been in that, my dear; it passes, like everything else.'' Upon many of her interlocutors, Madame Merle might have produced an irritating effect; it was so difficult to surprise her. But Isabel, though by no means incapable of desiring to be effective, had not at present this motive. She was too sincere, too interested in her judicious companion. And then, moreover, Madame Merle never said such things in the tone of triumph or of boastfulness; they dropped from her like grave confessions.

A period of bad weather had settled down upon Gardencourt; the days grew shorter, and there was an end to the pretty tea-parties on the lawn. But Isabel had long indoor conversations with her fellow-visitor, and in spite of the rain the two ladies often sallied forth for a walk, equipped with the defensive apparatus which the English climate and the English genius have between them brought to such perfection. Madame Merle was very appreciative; she liked almost everything, including the English rain. ‘‘There is always a little of it, and never too much at once,'' she said; ‘‘and it never wets you, and it always smells good.'' She declared that in England the pleasures of smell were great—that in this inimitable island there was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it might sound, was the national aroma, and was most agreeable to the nostril; and she used to lift the sleeve of her British overcoat and bury her nose in it, to inhale the clear, fine odour of the wool. Poor Ralph Touchett, as soon as the autumn had begun to define itself, became almost a prisoner; in bad weather he was unable to step out of the house, and he used sometimes to stand at one of the windows, with his hands in his pockets, and, with a countenance half rueful, half critical, watch Isabel and Madame Merle as they walked down the avenue under a pair of umbrellas. The roads about Gardencourt were so firm, even in the worst weather, that the two ladies always came back with a healthy glow in their cheeks, looking at the soles of their neat, stout boots, and declaring that their walk had done them inexpressible good. Before lunch Madame Merle was always engaged; Isabel admired the inveteracy with which she occupied herself. Our heroine had always passed for a person of resources and had taken a certain pride in being one; but she envied the talents, the accomplishments, the aptitudes, of Madame Merle. She found herself desiring to emulate them, and in this and other ways Madame Merle presented herself as a model. ‘‘I should like to be like that!'' Isabel secretly exclaimed, more than once, as one of her friend's numerous facets suddenly caught the light, and before long she knew that she had learned a lesson from this exemplary woman. It took no very long time, indeed, for Isabel to feel that she was, as the phrase is, under an influence. ‘‘What is the harm,'' she asked herself, ‘‘so long as it is a good one? The more one is under a good influence the better. The only thing is to see our steps as we take them—to understand them as we go. That I think I shall always do. I needn't be afraid of becoming too pliable; it is my fault that I am not pliable enough.'' It is said that imitation is the sincerest flattery; and if Isabel was tempted to reproduce in her deportment some of the most graceful features of that of her friend, it was not so much because she desired to shine herself as because she wished to hold up the lamp for Madame Merle. She liked her extremely; but she admired her even more than she liked her. She sometimes wondered what Henrietta Stackpole would say to her thinking so much of this brilliant fugitive from Brooklyn; and had a conviction that Henrietta would not approve of it. Henrietta would not like Madame Merle; for reasons that she could not have defined, this truth came home to Isabel. On the other hand she was equally sure that should the occasion offer, her new friend would accommodate herself perfectly to her old; Madame Merle was too humourous, too observant, not to do justice to Henrietta, and on becoming acquainted with her would probably give the measure of a tact which Miss Stackpole could not hope to emulate. She appeared to have, in her experience, a touchstone for everything, and somewhere in the capacious pocket of her genial memory she would find the key to Henrietta's virtues. ‘‘That is the great thing,'' Isabel reflected; ‘‘that is the supreme good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than they are for appreciating you.'' And she added that this, when one considered it, was simply the essence of the aristocratic situation. In this light, if in none other, one should aim at the aristocratic situation.