The Portrait of a Lady

  ‘‘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.

  I cannot enumerate all the links in the chain which led Isabel to think of Madame Merle’s situation as aristocratic—a view of it never expressed in any reference made to it by that lady herself. She had known great things and great people, but she had never played a great part. She was one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born to honours; she knew the world too well to be guilty of any fatuous illusions on the subject of her own place in it. She had known a good many of the fortunate few, and was perfectly aware of those points at which their fortune differed from hers. But if by her own measure she was nothing of a personage, she had yet, to Isabel’s imagination, a sort of greatness. To be so graceful, so gracious, so wise, so good, and to make so light of it all—that was really to be a great lady; especially when one looked so much like one. If Madame Merle, however, made light of her advantages as regards the world, it was not because she had not, for her own entertainment, taken them, as I have intimated, as seriously as possible. Her natural talents, for instance; these she had zealously cultivated. After breakfast she wrote a succession of letters; her correspondence was a source of surprise to Isabel when they sometimes walked together to the village post office, to deposit Madame Merle’s contribution to the mail. She knew a multitude of people, and, as she told Isabel, something was always turning up to be written about. Of painting she was devotedly fond, and made no more of taking a sketch than of pulling off her gloves. At Gardencourt she was perpetually taking advantage of an hour’s sunshine to go out with a camp-stool and a box of water-colours. That she was a brilliant musician we have already perceived, and it was evidence of the fact that when she seated herself at the piano, as she always did in the evening, her listeners resigned themselves without a murmur to losing the entertainment of her talk. Isabel, since she had known Madame Merle, felt ashamed of her own playing, which she now looked upon as meagre and artless; and indeed, though she had been thought to play very well, the loss to society when, in taking her place upon the music-stool, she turned her back to the room, was usually deemed greater than the gain. When Madame Merle was neither writing, nor painting, nor touching the piano, she was usually employed upon wonderful morsels of picturesque embroidery, cushions, curtains, decorations for the chimney-piece; a sort of work in which her bold, free invention was as remarkable as the agility of her needle. She was never idle, for when she was engaged in none of the ways I have mentioned, she was either reading (she appeared to Isabel to read everything important), or walking out, or playing patience with the cards, or talking with her fellow inmates. And with all this, she always had the social quality; she never was preoccupied, she never pressed too hard. She laid down her pastimes as easily as she took them up; she worked and talked at the same time, and she appeared to attach no importance to anything she did. She gave away her sketches and tapestries; she rose from the piano, or remained there, according to the convenience of her auditors, which she always unerringly divined. She was, in short, a most comfortable, profitable, agreeable person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault, it was that she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was affected or pretentious; for from these vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt; but that her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much smoothed. She had become too flexible, too supple; she was too finished, too civilized. She was, in a word, too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons in the ages before country-house life was the fashion. Isabel found it difficult to think of Madame Merle as an isolated figure; she existed only in her relations with her fellow-mortals. Isabel often wondered what her relations might be with her own soul. She always ended, however, by feeling that having a charming surface does not necessarily prove that one is superficial; this was an illusion in which, in her youth, she had only just sufficiently escaped being nourished. Madame Merle was not superficial—not she. She was deep; and her nature spoke none the less in her behaviour because it spoke a conventional language. ‘‘What is language at all but a convention?’’ said Isabel. ‘‘She has the good taste not to pretend, like some people I have met, to express herself by original signs.’’

  ?
??‘I am afraid you have suffered much,’’ Isabel once found occasion to say to her, in response to some allusion that she had dropped.

  ‘‘What makes you think that?’’ Madame Merle asked, with a picturesque smile. ‘‘I hope I have not the pose of a martyr.’’

  ‘‘No; but you sometimes say things that I think people who have always been happy would not have found out.’’

  ‘‘I have not always been happy,’’ said Madame Merle, smiling still, but with a mock gravity, as if she were telling a child a secret. ‘‘What a wonderful thing!’’

  ‘‘A great many people give me the impression of never having felt anything very much,’’ Isabel answered.

  ‘‘It’s very true; there are more iron pots, I think, than porcelain ones. But you may depend upon it that everyone has something; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole, somewhere. I flatter myself that I am rather stout porcelain; but if I must tell you the truth I have been chipped and cracked! I do very well for service yet, because I have been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard—the quiet, dusky cupboard, where there is an odour of stale spices—as much as I can. But when I have to come out, and into a strong light, then, my dear, I am a horror!’’

  I know not whether it was on this occasion or some other, that when the conversation had taken the turn I have just indicated, she said to Isabel that some day she would relate her history. Isabel assured her that she should delight to listen to it, and reminded her more than once of this engagement. Madame Merle, however, appeared to desire a postponement, and at last frankly told the young girl that she must wait till they knew each other better. This would certainly happen; a long friendship lay before them. Isabel assented, but at the same time asked Madame Merle if she could not trust her—if she feared a betrayal of confidence.

  ‘‘It is not that I am afraid of your repeating what I say,’’ the elder lady answered; ‘‘I am afraid, on the contrary, of your taking it too much to yourself. You would judge me too harshly; you are of the cruel age.’’ She preferred for the present to talk to Isabel about Isabel, and exhibited the greatest interest in our heroine’s history, her sentiments, opinions, prospects. She made her chatter, and listened to her chatter with inexhaustible sympathy and good nature. In all this there was something flattering to the girl, who knew that Madame Merle knew a great many distinguished people, and had lived, as Mrs. Touchett said, in the best company in Europe. Isabel thought the better of herself for enjoying the favour of a person who had so large a field of comparison; and it was perhaps partly to gratify this sense of profiting by comparison that she often begged her friend to tell her about the people she knew. Madame Merle had been a dweller in many lands, and had social ties in a dozen different countries. ‘‘I don’t pretend to be learned,’’ she would say, ‘‘but I think I know my Europe’’; and she spoke one day of going to Sweden to stay with an old friend, and another of going to Wallachia to follow up a new acquaintance. With England, where she had often stayed, she was thoroughly familiar; and for Isabel’s benefit threw a great deal of light upon the customs of the country and the character of the people, who ‘‘after all,’’ as she was fond of saying, were the finest people in the world.