The Portrait of A Lady (45 page)

‘‘You are very indiscreet,'' she said, rather wearily; ‘‘you should not have moved when I did.''

He had taken off his hat; he passed his hand over his forehead.

‘‘I always forget; I am out of the habit.''

‘‘You are quite unfathomable,'' she repeated, glancing up at the windows of the house, a modern structure in the new part of the town.

He paid no heed to this remark, but said to Madame Merle, with a considerable appearance of earnestness: ‘‘She is really very charming; I have scarcely known any one more graceful.''

‘‘I like to hear you say that. The better you like her, the better for me.''

‘‘I like her very much. She is all you said, and into the bargain she is capable of great devotion. She has only one fault.''

‘‘What is that?''

‘‘She has too many ideas.''

‘‘I warned you she was clever.''

‘‘Fortunately they are very bad ones,'' said Osmond.

‘‘Why is that fortunate?''

‘‘
Dame,
if they must be sacrificed!''

Madame Merle leaned back, looking straight before her; then she spoke to the coachman. But Osmond again detained her.

‘‘If I go to Rome, what shall I do with Pansy?''

‘‘I will go and see her,'' said Madame Merle.

27

I SHALL not undertake to give an account of Isabel's impressions of Rome, to analyse her feelings as she trod the ancient pavement of the Forum, or to number her pulsations as she crossed the threshold of St. Peter's. It is enough to say that her perception of the endless interest of the place was such as might have been expected in a young woman of her intelligence and culture. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things excited her, but she was quietly excited. It seemed to her companions that she spoke less than usual, and Ralph Touchett, when he appeared to be looking listlessly and awkwardly over her head, was really dropping an eye of observation upon her. To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would even have been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest hours of her life. The sense of the mighty human past was heavy upon her, but it was interfused in the strangest, suddenest, most capricious way, with the fresh, cool breath of the future. Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew whither any of them would lead her, and she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in ‘‘Murray.'' Rome, as Ralph said, was in capital condition. The herd of re-echoing tourists had departed, and most of the solemn places had relapsed into solemnity. The sky was a blaze of blue, and the plash of the fountains, in their mossy niches, had lost its chill and doubled its music. On the corners of the warm, bright streets one stumbled upon bundles of flowers.

Our friends had gone one afternoon—it was the third of their stay—to look at the latest excavations in the Forum; these labours having been for some time previous largely extended. They had gone down from the modern street to the level of the Sacred Way, along which they wandered with a reverence of step which was not the same on the part of each. Henrietta Stackpole was struck with the fact that ancient Rome had been paved a good deal like New York, and even found an analogy between the deep chariot-ruts which are traceable in the antique street and the iron grooves which mark the course of the American horse-car. The sun had begun to sink, the air was filled with a golden haze, and the long shadows of broken column and formless pedestal were thrown across the field of ruin. Henrietta wandered away with Mr. Bantling, in whose Latin reminiscences she was apparently much engrossed, and Ralph addressed such elucidations as he was prepared to offer to the attentive ear of our heroine. One of the humble archaeologists who hover about the place had put himself at the disposal of the two, and repeated his lesson with a fluency which the decline of the season had done nothing to impair. A process of digging was going on in a remote corner of the Forum, and he presently remarked that if it should please the
signori
to go and watch it a little, they might see something interesting. The proposal commended itself more to Ralph than to Isabel, who was weary with much wandering; so that she charged her companion to satisfy his curiosity while she patiently awaited his return. The hour and the place were much to her taste, and she should enjoy being alone. Ralph accordingly went off with the
cicerone,
while Isabel sat down on a prostrate column, near the foundations of the Capitol. She desired a quarter of an hour's solitude, but she was not long to enjoy it. Keen as was her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered around her, and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting awhile on these things, had wandered, by a can-catenation of stages it might require some subtlety to trace, to regions and objects more contemporaneous. From the Roman past to Isabel Archer's future was a long stride, but her imagination had taken it in a single flight, and now hovered in slow circles over the nearer and richer field. She was so absorbed in her thoughts, as she bent her eyes upon a row of cracked but not dislocated slabs covering the ground at her feet, that she had not heard the sound of approaching footsteps before a shadow was thrown across the line of her vision. She looked up and saw a gentleman—a gentleman who was not Ralph come back to say that the excavations were a bore. This personage was startled as she was startled; he stood there, smiling a little, blushing a good deal, and raising his hat.

‘‘Lord Warburton!'' Isabel exclaimed, getting up.

‘‘I had no idea it was you,'' he said. ‘‘I turned that corner and came upon you.''

Isabel looked about her.

‘‘I am alone, but my companions have just left me. My cousin is gone to look at the digging over there.''

‘‘Ah yes; I see.'' And Lord Warburton's eyes wandered vaguely in the direction Isabel had indicated. He stood firmly before her; he had stopped smiling; he folded his arms with a kind of deliberation. ‘‘Don't let me disturb you,'' he went on, looking at her dejected pillar. ‘‘I am afraid you are tired.''

‘‘Yes, I am rather tired.'' She hesitated a moment, and then she sat down. ‘‘But don't let me interrupt you,'' she added.

‘‘Oh dear, I am quite alone. I have nothing on earth to do. I had no idea you were in Rome. I have just come from the East. I am only passing through.''

‘‘You have been making a long journey,'' said Isabel, who had learned from Ralph that Lord Warburton was absent from England.

‘‘Yes, I came abroad for six months—soon after I saw you last. I have been in Turkey and Asia Minor; I came the other day from Athens.'' He spoke with visible embarrassment; this unexpected meeting caused him an emotion he was unable to conceal. He looked at Isabel a moment, and then he said, abruptly—‘‘Do you wish me to leave you, or will you let me stay a little?''

She looked up at him, gently. ‘‘I don't wish you to leave me, Lord Warburton; I am very glad to see you.''

‘‘Thank you for saying that. May I sit down?''

The fluted shaft on which Isabel had taken her seat would have afforded a resting-place to several persons, and there was plenty of room even for a highly developed Englishman. This fine specimen of that great class seated himself near our young lady, and in the course of five minutes he had asked her several questions, taken rather at random, and of which, as he asked some of them twice over, he apparently did not always heed the answer; had given her, too, some information about himself which was not wasted upon her calmer feminine sense. Lord Warburton, though he tried hard to seem easy, was agitated; he repeated more than once that he had not expected to meet her, and it was evident that the encounter touched him in a way that would have made preparation advisable. He had abrupt alternations of gaiety and gravity; he appeared at one moment to seek his neighbour's eye and at the next to avoid it. He was splendidly sunburnt; even his multitudinous beard seemed to have been burnished by the fire of Asia. He was dressed in the loose-fitting, heterogeneous garments in which the English traveller in foreign lands is wont to consult his comfort and affirm his nationality; and with his clear grey eye, his bronzed complexion, fresh beneath its brownness, his manly figure, his modest manner, and his general air of being a gentleman and an explorer, he was such a representative of the British race as need not in any clime have been disavowed by those who have a kindness for it. Isabel noted these things, and was glad she had always liked Lord Warburton. He was evidently as likeable as before, and the tone of his voice, which she had formerly thought delightful, was as good as an assurance that he would never change for the worse. They talked about the matters that were naturally in order; her uncle's death, Ralph's state of health, the way she had passed her winter, her visit to Rome, her return to Florence, her plans for the summer, the hotel she was staying at; and then Lord Warburton's own adventures, movements, intentions, impressions and present domicile. At last there was a silence, and she knew what he was thinking of. His eyes were fixed on the ground; but at last he raised them and said gravely— ‘‘I have written to you several times.''

‘‘Written to me? I have never got your letters.''

‘‘I never sent them. I burned them up.''

‘‘Ah,'' said Isabel with a laugh, ‘‘it was better that you should do that than I!''

‘‘I thought you wouldn't care about them,'' he went on, with a simplicity that might have touched her. ‘‘It seemed to me that after all I had no right to trouble you with letters.''

‘‘I should have been very glad to have news of you. You know that I hoped that—that—'' Isabel stopped; it seemed to her there would be a certain flatness in the utterance of her thought.

‘‘I know what you are going to say. You hoped we should always remain good friends.'' This formula, as Lord Warburton uttered it, was certainly flat enough; but then he was interested in making it appear so.

Isabel found herself reduced simply to saying— ‘‘Please don't talk of all that''; a speech which hardly seemed to her an improvement on the other.

‘‘It's a small consolation to allow me!'' Lord Warburton exclaimed, with force.

‘‘I can't pretend to console you,'' said the girl, who, as she sat there, found it good to think that she had given him the answer that had satisfied him so little six months before. He was pleasant, he was powerful, he was gallant, there was no better man than he. But her answer remained.

‘‘It's very well you don't try to console me; it would not be in your power,'' she heard him say, through the medium of her quickened reflections.

‘‘I hoped we should meet again, because I had no fear you would attempt to make me feel I had wronged you. But when you do that—the pain is greater than the pleasure.'' And Isabel got up, looking for her companions.

‘‘I don't want to make you feel that; of course I can't say that. I only just want you to know one or two things, in fairness to myself, as it were. I won't return to the subject again. I felt very strongly what I expressed to you last year; I couldn't think of anything else. I tried to forget—energetically, systematically. I tried to take an interest in some one else. I tell you this because I want you to know I did my duty. I didn't succeed. It was for the same purpose I went abroad—as far away as possible. They say travelling distracts the mind; but it didn't distract mine. I have thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I am exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true. However, I don't mean to trouble you now; it's only for a moment. I may add that when I came upon you a moment since, without the smallest idea of seeing you, I was in the very act of wishing I knew where you were.''

He had recovered his self-control, as I say, and while he spoke it became complete. He spoke plainly and simply, in a low tone of voice, in a matter-of-fact way. There might have been something impressive, even to a woman of less imagination than the one he addressed, in hearing this brilliant, brave-looking gentleman express himself so modestly and reasonably.

‘‘I have often thought of you, Lord Warburton,'' Isabel answered. ‘‘You may be sure I shall always do that.'' And then she added, with a smile—‘‘There is no harm in that, on either side.''

They walked along together, and she asked kindly about his sisters and requested him to let them know she had done so. He said nothing more about his own feelings, but returned to those more objective topics they had already touched upon. Presently he asked her when she was to leave Rome, and on her mentioning the limit of her stay, declared he was glad it was still so distant.

‘‘Why do you say that, if you yourself are only passing through?'' she inquired, with some anxiety.

‘‘Ah, when I said I was passing through I didn't mean that one would treat Rome as if it were Clapham Junction. To pass through Rome is to stop a week or two.''

‘‘Say frankly that you mean to stay as long as I do!''

Lord Warburton looked at her a moment, with an uncomfortable smile. ‘‘You won't like that. You are afraid you will see too much of me.''

‘‘It doesn't matter what I like. I certainly can't expect you to leave this delightful place on my account. But I confess I am afraid of you.''