<h2> CHAPTER XXXI </h2>
<p>
Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval
sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during this
interval that we are closely concerned with her; our attention is engaged
again on a certain day in the late spring-time, shortly after her return
to Palazzo Crescentini and a year from the date of the incidents just
narrated. She was alone on this occasion, in one of the smaller of the
numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses, and there was that
in her expression and attitude which would have suggested that she was
expecting a visitor. The tall window was open, and though its green
shutters were partly drawn the bright air of the garden had come in
through a broad interstice and filled the room with warmth and perfume.
Our young woman stood near it for some time, her hands clasped behind her;
she gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest. Too troubled for attention
she moved in a vain circle. Yet it could not be in her thought to catch a
glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house, since the
entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and
privacy always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a
process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this
attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself, and positively
more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent
in seeing the world. She had ranged, she would have said, through space
and surveyed much of mankind, and was therefore now, in her own eyes, a
very different person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had
begun to take the measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of
years before. She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned a
great deal more of life than this light-minded creature had even
suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined themselves to retrospect,
instead of fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would
have evoked a multitude of interesting pictures. These pictures would have
been both landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have
been the more numerous. With several of the images that might have been
projected on such a field we are already acquainted. There would be for
instance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine’s sister and Edmund Ludlow’s
wife, who had come out from New York to spend five months with her
relative. She had left her husband behind her, but had brought her
children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and tenderness
the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had been able to
snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossing the ocean with
extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladies in Paris before
taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet, even from the
American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age; so that while her
sister was with her Isabel had confined her movements to a narrow circle.
Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland in the month of July,
and they had spent a summer of fine weather in an Alpine valley where the
flowers were thick in the meadows and the shade of great chestnuts made a
resting-place for such upward wanderings as might be undertaken by ladies
and children on warm afternoons. They had afterwards reached the French
capital, which was worshipped, and with costly ceremonies, by Lily, but
thought of as noisily vacant by Isabel, who in these days made use of her
memory of Rome as she might have done, in a hot and crowded room, of a
phial of something pungent hidden in her handkerchief.
</p>
<p>
Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts and wonderments
not allayed at that altar; and after her husband had joined her found
further chagrin in his failure to throw himself into these speculations.
They all had Isabel for subject; but Edmund Ludlow, as he had always done
before, declined to be surprised, or distressed, or mystified, or elated,
at anything his sister-in-law might have done or have failed to do. Mrs.
Ludlow’s mental motions were sufficiently various. At one moment she
thought it would be so natural for that young woman to come home and take
a house in New York—the Rossiters’, for instance, which had an
elegant conservatory and was just round the corner from her own; at
another she couldn’t conceal her surprise at the girl’s not marrying some
member of one of the great aristocracies. On the whole, as I have said,
she had fallen from high communion with the probabilities. She had taken
more satisfaction in Isabel’s accession of fortune than if the money had
been left to herself; it had seemed to her to offer just the proper
setting for her sister’s slightly meagre, but scarce the less eminent
figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than Lily had thought likely—development,
to Lily’s understanding, being somehow mysteriously connected with
morning-calls and evening-parties. Intellectually, doubtless, she had made
immense strides; but she appeared to have achieved few of those social
conquests of which Mrs. Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily’s
conception of such achievements was extremely vague; but this was exactly
what she had expected of Isabel—to give it form and body. Isabel
could have done as well as she had done in New York; and Mrs. Ludlow
appealed to her husband to know whether there was any privilege she
enjoyed in Europe which the society of that city might not offer her. We
know ourselves that Isabel had made conquests—whether inferior or
not to those she might have effected in her native land it would be a
delicate matter to decide; and it is not altogether with a feeling of
complacency that I again mention that she had not rendered these
honourable victories public. She had not told her sister the history of
Lord Warburton, nor had she given her a hint of Mr. Osmond’s state of
mind; and she had had no better reason for her silence than that she
didn’t wish to speak. It was more romantic to say nothing, and, drinking
deep, in secret, of romance, she was as little disposed to ask poor Lily’s
advice as she would have been to close that rare volume forever. But Lily
knew nothing of these discriminations, and could only pronounce her
sister’s career a strange anti-climax—an impression confirmed by the
fact that Isabel’s silence about Mr. Osmond, for instance, was in direct
proportion to the frequency with which he occupied her thoughts. As this
happened very often it sometimes appeared to Mrs. Ludlow that she had lost
her courage. So uncanny a result of so exhilarating an incident as
inheriting a fortune was of course perplexing to the cheerful Lily; it
added to her general sense that Isabel was not at all like other people.
</p>
<p>
Our young lady’s courage, however, might have been taken as reaching its
height after her relations had gone home. She could imagine braver things
than spending the winter in Paris—Paris had sides by which it so
resembled New York, Paris was like smart, neat prose—and her close
correspondence with Madame Merle did much to stimulate such flights. She
had never had a keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness and
wantonness of liberty, than when she turned away from the platform at the
Euston Station on one of the last days of November, after the departure of
the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband and her children to
their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for her to regale; she was very
conscious of that; she was very observant, as we know, of what was good
for her, and her effort was constantly to find something that was good
enough. To profit by the present advantage till the latest moment she had
made the journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers. She would have
accompanied them to Liverpool as well, only Edmund Ludlow had asked her,
as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety and she asked such
impossible questions. Isabel watched the train move away; she kissed her
hand to the elder of her small nephews, a demonstrative child who leaned
dangerously far out of the window of the carriage and made separation an
occasion of violent hilarity, and then she walked back into the foggy
London street. The world lay before her—she could do whatever she
chose. There was a deep thrill in it all, but for the present her choice
was tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back from Euston Square
to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoon had already closed
in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air, looked weak and red; our
heroine was unattended and Euston Square was a long way from Piccadilly.
But Isabel performed the journey with a positive enjoyment of its dangers
and lost her way almost on purpose, in order to get more sensations, so
that she was disappointed when an obliging policeman easily set her right
again. She was so fond of the spectacle of human life that she enjoyed
even the aspect of gathering dusk in the London streets—the moving
crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops, the flaring stalls, the
dark, shining dampness of everything. That evening, at her hotel, she
wrote to Madame Merle that she should start in a day or two for Rome. She
made her way down to Rome without touching at Florence—having gone
first to Venice and then proceeded southward by Ancona. She accomplished
this journey without other assistance than that of her servant, for her
natural protectors were not now on the ground. Ralph Touchett was spending
the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, in the September previous, had
been recalled to America by a telegram from the <i>Interviewer</i>. This
journal offered its brilliant correspondent a fresher field for her genius
than the mouldering cities of Europe, and Henrietta was cheered on her way
by a promise from Mr. Bantling that he would soon come over to see her.
Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett to apologise for not presenting herself just
yet in Florence, and her aunt replied characteristically enough.
Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than
bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the
thing or one didn’t, and what one “would” have done belonged to the sphere
of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of
things. Her letter was frank, but (a rare case with Mrs. Touchett) not so
frank as it pretended. She easily forgave her niece for not stopping at
Florence, because she took it for a sign that Gilbert Osmond was less in
question there than formerly. She watched of course to see if he would now
find a pretext for going to Rome, and derived some comfort from learning
that he had not been guilty of an absence. Isabel, on her side, had not
been a fortnight in Rome before she proposed to Madame Merle that they
should make a little pilgrimage to the East. Madame Merle remarked that
her friend was restless, but she added that she herself had always been
consumed with the desire to visit Athens and Constantinople. The two
ladies accordingly embarked on this expedition, and spent three months in
Greece, in Turkey, in Egypt. Isabel found much to interest her in these
countries, though Madame Merle continued to remark that even among the
most classic sites, the scenes most calculated to suggest repose and
reflexion, a certain incoherence prevailed in her. Isabel travelled
rapidly and recklessly; she was like a thirsty person draining cup after
cup. Madame Merle meanwhile, as lady-in-waiting to a princess circulating
<i>incognita</i>, panted a little in her rear. It was on Isabel’s
invitation she had come, and she imparted all due dignity to the girl’s
uncountenanced state. She played her part with the tact that might have
been expected of her, effacing herself and accepting the position of a
companion whose expenses were profusely paid. The situation, however, had
no hardships, and people who met this reserved though striking pair on
their travels would not have been able to tell you which was patroness and
which client. To say that Madame Merle improved on acquaintance states
meagrely the impression she made on her friend, who had found her from the
first so ample and so easy. At the end of an intimacy of three months
Isabel felt she knew her better; her character had revealed itself, and
the admirable woman had also at last redeemed her promise of relating her
history from her own point of view—a consummation the more desirable
as Isabel had already heard it related from the point of view of others.
This history was so sad a one (in so far as it concerned the late M.
Merle, a positive adventurer, she might say, though originally so
plausible, who had taken advantage, years before, of her youth and of an
inexperience in which doubtless those who knew her only now would find it
difficult to believe); it abounded so in startling and lamentable
incidents that her companion wondered a person so <i>eprouvée</i> could
have kept so much of her freshness, her interest in life. Into this
freshness of Madame Merle’s she obtained a considerable insight; she
seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical, carried about in
its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or blanketed and bridled like
the “favourite” of the jockey. She liked her as much as ever, but there
was a corner of the curtain that never was lifted; it was as if she had
remained after all something of a public performer, condemned to emerge
only in character and in costume. She had once said that she came from a
distance, that she belonged to the “old, old” world, and Isabel never lost
the impression that she was the product of a different moral or social
clime from her own, that she had grown up under other stars.
</p>
<p>
She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality. Of course
the morality of civilised persons has always much in common; but our young
woman had a sense in her of values gone wrong or, as they said at the
shops, marked down. She considered, with the presumption of youth, that a
morality differing from her own must be inferior to it; and this
conviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an
occasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a person who had
raised delicate kindness to an art and whose pride was too high for the
narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives might, in
certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom in
decadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had not
even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain; and
there were evidently things in the world of which it was not advantageous
to hear. She had once or twice had a positive scare; since it so affected
her to have to exclaim, of her friend, “Heaven forgive her, she doesn’t
understand me!” Absurd as it may seem this discovery operated as a shock,
left her with a vague dismay in which there was even an element of
foreboding. The dismay of course subsided, in the light of some sudden
proof of Madame Merle’s remarkable intelligence; but it stood for a
high-water-mark in the ebb and flow of confidence. Madame Merle had once
declared her belief that when a friendship ceases to grow it immediately
begins to decline—there being no point of equilibrium between liking
more and liking less. A stationary affection, in other words, was
impossible—it must move one way or the other. However that might be,
the girl had in these days a thousand uses for her sense of the romantic,
which was more active than it had ever been. I do not allude to the
impulse it received as she gazed at the Pyramids in the course of an
excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among the broken columns of the
Acropolis and fixed her eyes upon the point designated to her as the
Strait of Salamis; deep and memorable as these emotions had remained. She
came back by the last of March from Egypt and Greece and made another stay
in Rome. A few days after her arrival Gilbert Osmond descended from
Florence and remained three weeks, during which the fact of her being with
his old friend Madame Merle, in whose house she had gone to lodge, made it
virtually inevitable that he should see her every day. When the last of
April came she wrote to Mrs. Touchett that she should now rejoice to
accept an invitation given long before, and went to pay a visit at Palazzo
Crescentini, Madame Merle on this occasion remaining in Rome. She found
her aunt alone; her cousin was still at Corfu. Ralph, however, was
expected in Florence from day to day, and Isabel, who had not seen him for
upwards of a year, was prepared to give him the most affectionate welcome.
</p>
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