The Portrait of a Lady

“Please explain about that young lady—your sister—then. I don’t understand about her. Is she a Lady?”

“She’s a capital good girl.”

“I don’t like the way you say that—as if you wanted to change the subject. Is her position inferior to yours?”

“We neither of us have any position to speak of; but she’s better off than I, because she has none of the bother.”

“Yes, she doesn’t look as if she had much bother. I wish I had as little bother as that. You do produce quiet people over here, whatever else you may do.”

“Ah, you see one takes life easily, on the whole,” said Lord Warburton. “And then you know we’re very dull. Ah, we can be dull when we try!”

“I should advise you to try something else. I shouldn’t know what to talk to your sister about; she looks so different. Is that silver cross a badge?”

“A badge?”

“A sign of rank.”

Lord Warburton’s glance had wandered a good deal, but at this it met the gaze of his neighbour. “Oh yes,” he answered in a moment; “the women go in for those things. The silver cross is worn by the eldest daughters of Viscounts.” Which was his harmless revenge for having occasionally had his credulity too easily engaged in America. After luncheon he proposed to Isabel to come into the gallery and look at the pictures; and though she knew he had seen the pictures twenty times she complied without criticising this pretext. Her conscience now was very easy; ever since she sent him her letter she had felt particularly light of spirit. He walked slowly to the end of the gallery, staring at its contents and saying nothing; and then he suddenly broke out: “I hoped you wouldn’t write to me that way.”

“It was the only way, Lord Warburton,” said the girl. “Do try and believe that.”

“If I could believe it of course I should let you alone. But we can’t believe by willing it; and I confess I don’t understand. I could understand your disliking me; that I could understand well. But that you should admit you do—”

“What have I admitted?” Isabel interrupted, turning slightly pale.

“That you think me a good fellow; isn’t that it?” She said nothing, and he went on: “You don’t seem to have any reason, and that gives me a sense of injustice.”

“I have a reason, Lord Warburton.” She said it in a tone that made his heart contract.

“I should like very much to know it.”

“I’ll tell you some day when there’s more to show for it.”

“Excuse my saying that in the mean time I must doubt of it.”

“You make me very unhappy,” said Isabel.

“I’m not sorry for that; it may help you to know how I feel. Will you kindly answer me a question?” Isabel made no audible assent, but he apparently saw in her eyes something that gave him courage to go on. “Do you prefer some one else?”

“That’s a question I’d rather not answer.”

“Ah, you do then!” her suitor murmured with bitterness.

The bitterness touched her, and she cried out: “You’re mistaken! I don’t.”

He sat down on a bench, unceremoniously, doggedly, like a man in trouble; leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor. “I can’t even be glad of that,” he said at last, throwing himself back against the wall; “for that would be an excuse.”

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “An excuse? Must I excuse myself?”

He paid, however, no answer to the question. Another idea had come into his head. “Is it my political opinions? Do you think I go too far?”

“I can’t object to your political opinions, because I don’t understand them.”

“You don’t care what I think!” he cried, getting up. “It’s all the same to you.”

Isabel walked to the other side of the gallery and stood there showing him her charming back, her light slim figure, the length of her white neck as she bent her head, and the density of her dark braids. She stopped in front of a small picture as if for the purpose of examining it; and there was something so young and free in her movement that her very pliancy seemed to mock at him. Her eyes, however, saw nothing; they had suddenly been suffused with tears. In a moment he followed her, and by this time she had brushed her tears away; but when she turned round her face was pale and the expression of her eyes strange. “That reason that I wouldn’t tell you—I’ll tell it you after all. It’s that I can’t escape my fate.”

“Your fate?”

“I should try to escape it if I were to marry you.”

“I don’t understand. Why should not that be your fate as well as anything else?”

“Because it’s not,” said Isabel femininely. “I know it’s not. It’s not my fate to give up—I know it can’t be.”

Poor Lord Warburton stared, an interrogative point in either eye. “Do you call marrying me giving up?”

“Not in the usual sense. It’s getting—getting—getting a great deal. But it’s giving up other chances.”

“Other chances for what?”

“I don’t mean chances to marry,” said Isabel, her colour quickly coming back to her. And then she stopped, looking down with a deep frown, as if it were hopeless to attempt to make her meaning clear.

“I don’t think it presumptuous in me to suggest that you’ll gain more than you’ll lose,” her companion observed.

“I can’t escape unhappiness,” said Isabel. “In marrying you I shall be trying to.”

“I don’t know whether you’d try to, but you certainly would: that I must in candour admit!” he exclaimed with an anxious laugh.

“I mustn’t—I can’t!” cried the girl.

“Well, if you’re bent on being miserable I don’t see why you should make me so. Whatever charms a life of misery may have for you, it has none for me.”

“I’m not bent on a life of misery,” said Isabel. “I’ve always been intensely determined to be happy, and I’ve often believed I should be. I’ve told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself.”

“By separating yourself from what?”

“From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer.”

Lord Warburton broke into a smile that almost denoted hope. “Why, my dear Miss Archer,” he began to explain with the most considerate eagerness, “I don’t offer you any exoneration from life or from any chances or dangers whatever. I wish I could; depend upon it I would! For what do you take me, pray? Heaven help me, I’m not the Emperor of China! All I offer you is the chance of taking the common lot in a comfortable sort of way. The common lot? Why, I’m devoted to the common lot! Strike an alliance with me, and I promise you that you shall have plenty of it. You shall separate from nothing whatever—not even from your friend Miss Stackpole.”

“She’d never approve of it,” said Isabel, trying to smile and take advantage of this side-issue; despising herself too, not a little, for doing so.

“Are we speaking of Miss Stackpole?” his lordship asked impatiently. “I never saw a person judge things on such theoretic grounds.”

“Now I suppose you’re speaking of me,” said Isabel with humility; and she turned away again, for she saw Miss Molyneux enter the gallery, accompanied by Henrietta and by Ralph.

Lord Warburton’s sister addressed him with a certain timidity and reminded him she ought to return home in time for tea, as she was expecting company to partake of it. He made no answer—apparently not having heard her; he was preoccupied, and with good reason. Miss Molyneux—as if he had been Royalty—stood like a lady-in-waiting.

“Well, I never, Miss Molyneux!” said Henrietta Stackpole. “If I wanted to go he’d have to go. If I wanted my brother to do a thing he’d have to do it.”

“Oh, Warburton does everything one wants,” Miss Molyneux answered with a quick, shy laugh. “How very many pictures you have!” she went on, turning to Ralph.

“They look a good many, because they’re all put together,” said Ralph. “But it’s really a bad way.”

“Oh, I think it’s so nice. I wish we had a gallery at Lockleigh. I’m so very fond of pictures,” Miss Molyneux went on, persistently, to Ralph, as if she were afraid Miss Stackpole would address her again. Henrietta appeared at once to fascinate and to frighten her.

“Ah yes, pictures are very convenient,” said Ralph, who appeared to know better what style of reflexion was acceptable to her.

“They’re so very pleasant when it rains,” the young lady continued. “It has rained of late so very often.”

“I’m sorry you’re going away, Lord Warburton,” said Henrietta. “I wanted to get a great deal more out of you.”

“I’m not going away,” Lord Warburton answered.

“Your sister says you must. In America the gentlemen obey the ladies.”

“I’m afraid we have some people to tea,” said Miss Molyneux, looking at her brother.

“Very good, my dear. We’ll go.”

“I hoped you would resist!” Henrietta exclaimed. “I wanted to see what Miss Molyneux would do.”

“I never do anything,” said this young lady.

“I suppose in your position it’s sufficient for you to exist!” Miss Stackpole returned. “I should like very much to see you at home.”

“You must come to Lockleigh again,” said Miss Molyneux, very sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel’s friend. Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton—the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux and then she said: “I’m afraid I can never come again.”

“Never again?”

“I’m afraid I’m going away.”

“Oh, I’m so very sorry,” said Miss Molyneux. “I think that’s so very wrong of you.”

Lord Warburton watched this little passage; then he turned away and stared at a picture. Ralph, leaning against the rail before the picture with his hands in his pockets, had for the moment been watching him.

“I should like to see you at home,” said Henrietta, whom Lord Warburton found beside him. “I should like an hour’s talk with you; there are a great many questions I wish to ask you.”

“I shall be delighted to see you,” the proprietor of Lockleigh answered; “but I’m certain not to be able to answer many of your questions. When will you come?”

“Whenever Miss Archer will take me. We’re thinking of going to London, but we’ll go and see you first. I’m determined to get some satisfaction out of you.”

“If it depends upon Miss Archer I’m afraid you won’t get much. She won’t come to Lockleigh; she doesn’t like the place.”

“She told me it was lovely!” said Henrietta.

Lord Warburton hesitated. “She won’t come, all the same. You had better come alone,” he added.

Henrietta straightened herself, and her large eyes expanded. “Would you make that remark to an English lady?” she enquired with soft asperity.

Lord Warburton stared. “Yes, if I liked her enough.”

“You’d be careful not to like her enough. If Miss Archer won’t visit your place again it’s because she doesn’t want to take me. I know what she thinks of me, and I suppose you think the same—that I oughtn’t to bring in individuals.” Lord Warburton was at a loss; he had not been made acquainted with Miss Stackpole’s professional character and failed to catch her allusion. “Miss Archer has been warning you!” she therefore went on.

“Warning me?”

“Isn’t that why she came off alone with you here—to put you on your guard?”

“Oh dear, no,” said Lord Warburton brazenly; “our talk had no such solemn character as that.”

“Well, you’ve been on your guard—intensely. I suppose it’s natural to you; that’s just what I wanted to observe. And so, too, Miss Molyneux—she wouldn’t commit herself. You have been warned, anyway,” Henrietta continued, addressing this young lady; “but for you it wasn’t necessary.”

“I hope not,” said Miss Molyneux vaguely.

“Miss Stackpole takes notes,” Ralph soothingly explained. “She’s a great satirist; she sees through us all and she works us up.”

“Well, I must say I never have had such a collection of bad material!” Henrietta declared, looking from Isabel to Lord Warburton and from this nobleman to his sister and to Ralph. “There’s something the matter with you all; you’re as dismal as if you had got a bad cable.”

“You do see through us, Miss Stackpole,” said Ralph in a low tone, giving her a little intelligent nod as he led the party out of the gallery. “There’s something the matter with us all.”

Isabel came behind these two; Miss Molyneux, who decidedly liked her immensely, had taken her arm, to walk beside her over the polished floor. Lord Warburton strolled on the other side with his hands behind him and his eyes lowered. For some moments he said nothing; and then, “Is it true you’re going to London?” he asked.

“I believe it has been arranged.”

“And when shall you come back?”

“In a few days; but probably for a very short time. I’m going to Paris with my aunt.”

“When, then, shall I see you again?”

“Not for a good while,” said Isabel. “But some day or other, I hope.”

“Do you really hope it?”

“Very much.”

He went a few steps in silence; then he stopped and put out his hand. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said Isabel.

Miss Molyneux kissed her again, and she let the two depart. After it, without rejoining Henrietta and Ralph, she retreated to her own room; in which apartment, before dinner, she was found by Mrs. Touchett, who had stopped on her way to the salon. “I may as well tell you,” said that lady, “that your uncle has informed me of your relations with Lord Warburton.”

Isabel considered. “Relations? They’re hardly relations. That’s the strange part of it: he has seen me but three or four times.”

“Why did you tell your uncle rather than me?” Mrs. Touchett dispassionately asked.

Again the girl hesitated. “Because he knows Lord Warburton better.”

“Yes, but I know you better.”

“I’m not sure of that,” said Isabel, smiling.

“Neither am I, after all; especially when you give me that rather conceited look. One would think you were awfully pleased with yourself and had carried off a prize! I suppose that when you refuse an offer like Lord Warburton’s it’s because you expect to do something better.”

“Ah, my uncle didn’t say that!” cried Isabel, smiling still.

CHAPTER 15

It had been arranged that the two young ladies should proceed to London under Ralph’s escort, though Mrs. Touchett looked with little favour on the plan. It was just the sort of plan, she said, that Miss Stackpole would be sure to suggest, and she enquired if the correspondent of the Interviewer was to take the party to stay at her favourite boarding-house.

“I don’t care where she takes us to stay, so long as there’s local colour,” said Isabel. “That’s what we’re going to London for.”

“I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may do anything,” her aunt rejoined. “After that one needn’t stand on trifles.”

“Should you have liked me to marry Lord Warburton?” Isabel enquired.

“Of course I should.”

“I thought you disliked the English so much.”

“So I do; but it’s all the greater reason for making use of them.”

“Is that your idea of marriage?” And Isabel ventured to add that her aunt appeared to her to have made very little use of Mr. Touchett.

“Your uncle’s 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 I’m too good to improve. 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 smallest, sparest voice. “Only, the next great offer you get, I hope you’ll manage to come up to your standard.”

“We had better wait till the offer comes before we talk about it. I hope very much I may have no more offers for the present. They upset me completely.”

“You probably won’t be troubled with them if you adopt permanently the Bohemian manner of life. However, I’ve promised Ralph not to criticise.”

“I’ll do whatever Ralph says is right,” Isabel returned. “I’ve unbounded confidence in Ralph.”

“His mother’s much obliged to you!” this lady dryly laughed.

“It seems to me indeed she ought to feel it!” Isabel irrepressibly answered.

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 had 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 their visitors 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 being familiar with deeper fears than that of a cold kitchen. He availed himself largely indeed of the resources 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 wears in the month of September a face blank but for its smears of prior service, the young man, who occasionally took an apologetic tone, was obliged to remind his companion, to Miss Stackpole’s high derision, that there wasn’t a creature in town.

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

Ralph declared that for him the aristocracy left no void that Miss Stackpole herself didn’t 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, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth. When he went home at night to the empty house in Winchester Square, after a chain of hours with his comparatively ardent friends, 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 lone constable. His own step, in the empty place, 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 armchairs; the big dark dining table twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent. There was a ghostly presence 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 his 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 him 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 full of premises, conclusions, emotions; if she had come in search of local colour she found it everywhere. She asked more questions than he could answer, and launched brave theories, as to historic cause and social effect, 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 proved an indestructible sightseer and a more lenient judge than Ralph had ventured to hope. She had indeed many disappointments, and London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of the strong points of the American civic idea; but she made the best of its dingy dignities 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’ve 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 enquired 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, but none of those that would help along. 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 guidebook and pencil and wrote a letter to the Interviewer about the Tower (in which she described the execution of Lady Jane Grey), had a sad sense of falling below her mission.

The incident that had preceded Isabel’s departure from Gardencourt left a painful trace in our young woman’s mind: when she felt again in her face, as from a recurrent wave, the cold breath of her last suitor’s surprise, she could only muffle her head till the air cleared. She could not have done less than what she did; this was certainly true. But her necessity, all the same, had been as graceless as some physical act in a strained attitude, and she felt no desire to take credit for her conduct. Mixed with this imperfect pride, nevertheless, 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 odd demonstrations. 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, kissed them. Ralph noticed these quaint charities; he noticed everything she did. One afternoon, that his companions might pass the time, he invited them to tea in Winchester Square, and he had the house set in order as much as possible for their visit. There was another guest to meet them, an amiable bachelor, an old friend of Ralph’s who happened to be in town and for whom prompt commerce with Miss Stackpole appeared to have neither difficulty nor dread. Mr. Bantling, a stout, sleek, smiling man of forty, wonderfully dressed, universally informed and incoherently amused, laughed immoderately at everything Henrietta said, gave her several cups of tea, examined in her society the bric-a-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 fete-champetre, walked round the limited enclosure several times with her and, at a dozen turns of their talk, bounded responsive—as with a positive passion for argument—to her remarks upon the inner life.