The Portrait of A Lady (76 page)

‘‘Well,'' said Henrietta, as if she were beginning an argument, ‘‘nothing is more common in our Western cities, and it is to them, after all, that we must look in the future.'' Her argument, however, does not concern this history, which has too many other threads to unwind. She announced to Ralph Touchett that she was ready to leave Rome by any train that he might designate, and Ralph immediately pulled himself together for departure. Isabel went to see him at the last, and he made the same remark that Henrietta had made. It struck him that Isabel was uncommonly glad to get rid of them all.

For all answer to this she gently laid her hand on his, and said in a low tone, with a quick smile: ‘‘My dear Ralph!''

It was answer enough, and he was quite contented. But he went on, in the same way, jocosely, ingenuously— ‘‘I've seen less of you than I might, but it's better than nothing. And then I have heard a great deal about you.''

‘‘I don't know from whom, leading the life you have done.''

‘‘From the voices of the air! Oh, from no one else; I never let other people speak of you. They always say you are ‘charming,' and that's so flat.''

‘‘I might have seen more of you, certainly,'' Isabel said. ‘‘But when one is married one has so much occupation.''

‘‘Fortunately I am not married. When you come to see me in England, I shall be able to entertain you with all the freedom of a bachelor.'' He continued to talk as if they should certainly meet again, and succeeded in making the assumption appear almost just. He made no allusion to his term being near, to the probability that he should not outlast the summer. If he preferred it so, Isabel was willing enough; the reality was sufficiently distinct, without their erecting fingerposts in conversation. That had been well enough for the earlier time, though about this as about his other affairs Ralph had never been egotistic. Isabel spoke of his journey, of the stages into which he should divide it, of the precautions he should take.

‘‘Henrietta is my greatest precaution,'' Ralph said. ‘‘The conscience of that woman is sublime.''

‘‘Certainly, she will be very conscientious.''

‘‘Will be? She has been! It's only because she thinks it's her duty that she goes with me. There's a conception of duty for you.''

‘‘Yes, it's a generous one,'' said Isabel, ‘‘and it makes me deeply ashamed. I ought to go with you, you know.''

‘‘Your husband wouldn't like that.''

‘‘No, he wouldn't like it. But I might go, all the same.''

‘‘I am startled by the boldness of your imagination. Fancy my being a cause of disagreement between a lady and her husband!''

‘‘That's why I don't go,'' said Isabel, simply, but not very lucidly.

Ralph understood well enough, however. ‘‘I should think so, with all those occupations you speak of.''

‘‘It isn't that. I am afraid,'' said Isabel. After a pause she repeated, as if to make herself, rather than him, hear the words—‘‘I am afraid.''

Ralph could hardly tell what her tone meant; it was so strangely deliberate—apparently so void of emotion. Did she wish to do public penance for a fault of which she had not been convicted? Or were her words simply an attempt at enlightened self-analysis? However this might be, Ralph could not resist so easy an opportunity. ‘‘Afraid of your husband?'' he said, jocosely.

‘‘Afraid of myself!'' said Isabel, getting up. She stood there a moment, and then she added—‘‘If I were afraid of my husband, that would be simply my duty. That is what women are expected to be.''

‘‘Ah, yes,'' said Ralph, laughing; ‘‘but to make up for it there is always some man awfully afraid of some woman!''

She gave no heed to this pleasantry, but suddenly took a different turn. ‘‘With Henrietta at the head of your little band,'' she exclaimed abruptly, ‘‘there will be nothing left for Mr. Goodwood!''

‘‘Ah, my dear Isabel,'' Ralph answered, ‘‘he's used to that. There
is
nothing left for Mr. Goodwood!''

Isabel coloured, and then she declared, quickly, that she must leave him. They stood together a moment; both her hands were in both of his. ‘‘You have been my best friend,'' she said.

‘‘It was for you that I wanted—that I wanted to live. But I am of no use to you.''

Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept that; she could not part with him that way. ‘‘If you should send for me I would come,'' she said at last.

‘‘Your husband won't consent to that,''

‘‘Oh yes, I can arrange it.''

‘‘I shall keep that for my last pleasure!'' said Ralph.

In answer to which she simply kissed him.

It was a Thursday, and that evening Caspar Goodwood came to the Palazzo Roccanera. He was among the first to arrive, and he spent some time in conversation with Gilbert Osmond, who almost always was present when his wife received. They sat down together, and Osmond, talkative, communicative, expansive, seemed possessed with a kind of intellectual gaiety. He leaned back with his legs crossed, lounging and chatting, while Goodwood, more restless, but not at all lively, shifted his position, played with his hat, made the little sofa creak beneath him. Osmond's face wore a sharp, aggressive smile; he was like a man whose perceptions had been quickened by good news. He remarked to Goodwood that he was very sorry they were to lose him; he himself should particularly miss him. He saw so few intelligent men—they were surprisingly scarce in Rome. He must be sure to come back; there was something very refreshing, to an inveterate Italian like himself, in talking with a genuine outsider.

‘‘I am very fond of Rome, you know,'' Osmond said; ‘‘but there is nothing I like better than to meet people who haven't that superstition. The modern world is after all very fine. Now you are thoroughly modern, and yet you are not at all flimsy. So many of the moderns we see are such very poor stuff. If they are the children of the future we are willing to die young. Of course the ancients too are often very tiresome. My wife and I like everything that is really new—not the mere pretence of it. There is nothing new, unfortunately, in ignorance and stupidity. We see plenty of that in forms that offer themselves as a revelation of progress, of light. A revelation of vulgarity! There is a certain kind of vulgarity which I believe is really new; I don't think there ever was anything like it before. Indeed I don't find vulgarity, at all, before the present century. You see a faint menace of it here and there in the last, but to-day the air has grown so dense that delicate things are literally not recognized. Now, we have liked you—'' And Osmond hesitated a moment, laying his hand gently on Goodwood's knee and smiling with a mixture of assurance and embarrassment. ‘‘I am going to say something extremely offensive and patronizing, but you must let me have the satisfaction of it. We have liked you because—because you have reconciled us a little to the future. If there are to be a certain number of people like you—
à la bonne heure!
I am talking for my wife as well as for myself, you see. She speaks for me; why shouldn't I speak for her? We are as united, you know, as the candlestick and the snuffers. Am I assuming too much when I say that I think I have understood from you that your occupations have been—a—commercial? There is a danger in that, you know; but it's the way you have escaped that strikes us. Excuse me if my little compliment seems in execrable taste; fortunately my wife doesn't hear me. What I mean is that you
might have been
—a—what I was mentioning just now. The whole American world was in a conspiracy to make you so. But you resisted, you have something that saved you. And yet you are so modern, so modern; the most modern man we know! We shall always be delighted to see you again.''

I have said that Osmond was in good humour, and these remarks will give ample evidence of the fact. They were infinitely more personal than he usually cared to be, and if Caspar Goodwood had attended to them more closely he might have thought that the defence of delicacy was in rather odd hands. We may believe, however, that Osmond knew very well what he was about, and that if he chose for once to be a little vulgar, he had an excellent reason for the escapade. Goodwood had only a vague sense that he was laying it on, somehow; he scarcely knew where the mixture was applied. Indeed he scarcely knew what Osmond was talking about; he wanted to be alone with Isabel, and that idea spoke louder to him than her husband's perfectly modulated voice. He watched her talking with other people, and wondered when she would be at liberty, and whether he might ask her to go into one of the other rooms. His humour was not, like Osmond's, of the best; there was an element of dull rage in his consciousness of things. Up to this time he had not disliked Osmond personally; he had only thought him very well informed and obliging, and more than he had supposed like the person whom Isabel Archer would naturally marry. Osmond had won in the open field a great advantage over him, and Goodwood had too strong a sense of fair play to have been moved to underrate him on that account. He had not tried positively to like him; this was a flight of sentimental benevolence of which, even in the days when he came nearest to reconciling himself to what had happened, Goodwood was quite incapable. He accepted him as a rather brilliant personage of the amateurish kind, afflicted with a redundancy of leisure which it amused him to work off in little refinements of conversation. But he only half trusted him; he could never make out why the deuce Osmond should lavish refinements of any sort upon
him.
It made him suspect that he found some private entertainment in it, and it ministered to a general impression that his successful rival had a fantastic streak in his composition. He knew indeed that Osmond could have no reason to wish him evil; he had nothing to fear from him. He had carried off a supreme advantage, and he could afford to be kind to a man who had lost everything. It was true that Goodwood at times had wished Osmond were dead, and would have liked to kill him; but Osmond had no means of knowing this, for practise had made Goodwood quite perfect in the art of appearing inaccessible to-day to any violent emotion. He cultivated this art in order to deceive himself, but it was others that he deceived first. He cultivated it, moreover, with very limited success; of which there could be no better proof than the deep, dumb irritation that reigned in his soul when he heard Osmond speak of his wife's feelings as if he were commissioned to answer for them. That was all he had an ear for in what his host said to him this evening; he was conscious that Osmond made more of a point even than usual of referring to the conjugal harmony which prevailed at the Palazzo Roccanera. He was more careful than ever to speak as if he and his wife had all things in sweet community, and it were as natural to each of them to say ‘‘we'' as to say ‘‘I.'' In all this there was an air of intention which puzzled and angered our poor Bostonian, who could only reflect for his comfort that Mrs. Osmond's relations with her husband were none of his business. He had no proof whatever that her husband misrepresented her, and if he judged her by the surface of things was bound to believe that she liked her life. She had never given him the faintest sign of discontent. Miss Stackpole had told him that she had lost her illusions, but writing for the papers had made Miss Stackpole sensational. She was too fond of early news. Moreover, since her arrival in Rome she had been much on her guard; she had ceased to flash her lantern at him. This, indeed, it may be said for her, would have been quite against her conscience. She had now seen the reality of Isabel's situation, and it had inspired her with a just reserve. Whatever could be done to improve it, the most useful form of assistance would not be to inflame her former lovers with a sense of her wrongs. Miss Stackpole continued to take a deep interest in the state of Mr. Goodwood's feelings, but she showed it at present only by sending him choice extracts, humorous and other, from the American journals, of which she received several by every post and which she always perused with a pair of scissors in her hand. The articles she cut out she placed in an envelope addressed to Mr. Goodwood, which she left with her own hand at his hotel. He never asked her a question about Isabel; hadn't he come five thousand miles to see for himself? He was thus not in the least authorized to think Mrs. Osmond unhappy; but the very absence of authorization operated as an irritant, ministered to the angry pain with which, in spite of his theory that he had ceased to care, he now recognized that, as far as she was concerned, the future had nothing more for him. He had not even the satisfaction of knowing the truth; apparently he could not even be trusted to respect her if she
were
unhappy. He was hopeless, he was helpless, he was superfluous. To this last fact she had called his attention by her ingenious plan for making him leave Rome. He had no objection whatever to doing what he could for her cousin, but it made him grind his teeth to think that of all the services she might have asked of him this was the one she had been eager to select. There had been no danger of her choosing one that would have kept him in Rome!

To-night what he was chiefly thinking of was that he was to leave her to-morrow, and that he had gained nothing by coming but the knowledge that he was as superfluous as ever. About herself he had gained no knowledge; she was imperturbable, impenetrable. He felt the old bitterness, which he had tried so hard to swallow, rise again in his throat, and he knew that there are disappointments which last as long as life. Osmond went on talking; Goodwood was vaguely aware that he was touching again upon his perfect intimacy with his wife. It seemed to him for a moment that Osmond had a kind of demoniac imagination; it was impossible that without malice he should have selected so unusual a topic. But what did it matter, after all, whether he were demoniac or not, and whether she loved him or hated him? She might hate him to the death without Goodwood's gaining by it.