The Portrait of a Lady

  On the afternoon I began with speaking of, she had taken a resolution not to think of Madame Merle; but the resolution proved vain, and this lady’s image hovered constantly before her. She asked herself, with an almost childlike horror of the supposition, whether to this intimate friend of several years the great historical epithet of wicked were to be applied. She knew the idea only by the Bible and other literary works; to the best of her belief she had no personal acquaintance with wickedness. She had desired a large acquaintance with human life, and in spite of her having flattered herself that she cultivated it with some success, this elementary privilege had been denied her. Perhaps it was not wicked—in the historic sense—to be false; for that was what Madame Merle had been. Isabel’s Aunt Lydia had made this discovery long before, and had mentioned it to her niece; but Isabel had flattered herself at this time that she had a much richer view of things, especially of the spontaneity of her own career and the nobleness of her own interpretations, than poor stiffly reasoning Mrs. Touchett. Madame Merle had done what she wanted; she had brought about the union of her two friends; a reflection which could not fail to make it a matter of wonder that she should have desired such an event. There were people who had the match-making passion, like the votaries of art for art; but Madame Merle, great artist as she was, was scarcely one of these. She thought too ill of marriage, too ill even of life; she had desired that marriage, but she had not desired others. She therefore had had an idea of gain, and Isabel asked herself where she had found her profit. It took her, naturally, a long time to discover, and even then her discovery was very incomplete. It came back to her that Madame Merle, though she had seemed to like her from their first meeting at Gardencourt, had been doubly affectionate after Mr. Touchett’s death, and after learning that her young friend was a victim of the good old man’s benevolence. She had found her profit not in the gross device of borrowing money from Isabel, but in the more refined idea of introducing one of her intimates to the young girl’s fortune. She had naturally chosen her closest intimate, and it was already vivid enough to Isabel that Gilbert Osmond occupied this position. She found herself confronted in this manner with the conviction that the man in the world whom she had supposed to be the least sordid had married her for her money. Strange to say, it had never before occurred to her; if she had thought a good deal of harm of Osmond, she had not done him this particular injury. This was the worst she could think of, and she had been saying to herself that the worst was still to come. A man might marry a woman for her money, very well; the thing was often done. But at least he should let her know! She wondered whether, if he wanted her money, her money to-day would satisfy him. Would he take her money and let her go? Ah, if Mr. Touchett’s great charity would help her to-day, it would be blessed indeed! It was not slow to occur to her that if Madame Merle had wished to do Osmond a service, his recognition of the fact must have lost its warmth. What must be his feelings to-day in regard to his too zealous benefactress, and what expression must they have found on the part of such a master of irony? It is a singular, but a characteristic, fact that before Isabel returned from her silent drive she had broken its silence by the soft exclamation: ‘‘Poor Madame Merle!’’

  Her exclamation would perhaps have been justified if on this same afternoon she had been concealed behind one of the valuable curtains of time-softened damask which dressed the interesting little salon of the lady to whom it referred; the carefully arranged apartment to which we once paid a visit in company with the discreet Mr. Rosier. In that apartment, towards six o’clock, Gilbert Osmond was seated, and his hostess stood before him as Isabel had seen her stand on an occasion commemorated in this history with an emphasis appropriate not so much to its apparent as to its real importance.

  ‘‘I don’t believe you are unhappy; I believe you like it,’’ said Madame Merle.

  ‘‘Did I say I was unhappy?’’ Osmond asked, with a face grave enough to suggest that he might have been so.

  ‘‘No, but you don’t say the contrary, as you ought in common gratitude.’’

  ‘‘Don’t talk about gratitude,’’ Osmond returned, dryly. ‘‘And don’t aggravate me,’’ he added in a moment.

  Madame Merle slowly seated herself, with her arms folded and her white hands arranged as a support to one of them and an ornament, as it were, to the other. She looked exquisitely calm, but impressively sad.

  ‘‘On your side, don’t try to frighten me,’’ she said. ‘‘I wonder whether you know some of my thoughts.’’

  ‘‘No more than I can help. I have quite enough of my own.’’

  ‘‘That’s because they are so delightful.’’

  Osmond rested his head against the back of his chair and looked at his companion for a long time, with a kind of cynical directness which seemed also partly an expression of fatigue. ‘‘You do aggravate me,’’ he remarked in a moment. ‘‘I am very tired.’’

  ‘‘Eh moi, donc!’’ cried Madame Merle.

  ‘‘With you, it’s because you fatigue yourself. With me, it’s not my own fault.’’

  ‘‘When I fatigue myself it’s for you. I have given you an interest; that’s a great gift.’’

  ‘‘Do you call it an interest?’’ Osmond inquired, languidly.

  ‘‘Certainly, since it helps you to pass your time.’’

  ‘‘The time has never seemed longer to me than this winter.’’

  ‘‘You have never looked better; you have never been so agreeable, so brilliant!’’

  ‘‘Damn my brilliancy!’’ Osmond murmured, thoughtfully. ‘‘How little, after all, you know me!’’

  ‘‘If I don’t know you, I know nothing,’’ said Madame Merle, smiling. ‘‘You have the feeling of complete success.’’

  ‘‘No, I shall not have that till I have made you stop judging me.’’

  ‘‘I did that long ago. I speak from old knowledge. But you express yourself more, too.’’

  Osmond hesitated a moment. ‘‘I wish you would express yourself less!’’

  ‘‘You wish to condemn me to silence? Remember that I have never been a chatterbox. At any rate, there are three or four things that I should like to say to you first. Your wife doesn’t know what to do with herself,’’ she went on, with a change of tone.

  ‘‘Excuse me; she knows perfectly. She has a line sharply marked out. She means to carry out her ideas.’’

  ‘‘Her ideas, to-day, must be remarkable.’’

  ‘‘Certainly they are. She has more of them than ever.’’

  ‘‘She was unable to show me any this morning,’’ said Madame Merle. ‘‘She seemed in a very simple, almost in a stupid, state of mind. She was completely bewildered.’’

  ‘‘You had better say at once that she was pathetic.’’

  ‘‘Ah no, I don’t want to encourage you too much.’’

  Osmond still had his head against the cushion behind him; the ankle of one foot rested on the other knee. So he sat for a while. ‘‘I should like to know what is the matter with you,’’ he said, at last.

  ‘‘The matter—the matter—’’ And here Madame Merle stopped. Then she went on, with a sudden outbreak of passion, a burst of summer thunder in a clear sky—‘‘The matter is that I would give my right hand to be able to weep, and that I can’t!’’

  ‘‘What good would it do you to weep?’’

  ‘‘It would make me feel as I felt before I knew you.’’

  ‘‘If I have dried your tears, that’s something. But I have seen you shed them.’’

  ‘‘Oh, I believe you will make me cry still. I have a great hope of that. I was vile this morning; I was horrid,’’ said Madame Merle.

  ‘‘If Isabel was in the stupid state of mind you mention, she probably didn’t perceive it,’’ Osmond answered.

  ‘‘It was precisely my devilry that stupefied her. I couldn’t help it; I was full of something bad. Perhaps it was something good; I don’t know. You have not only dried up my tears; you have drie
d up my soul.’’

  ‘‘It is not I then that am responsible for my wife’s condition,’’ Osmond said. ‘‘It is pleasant to think that I shall get the benefit of your influence upon her. Don’t you know the soul is an immortal principle? How can it suffer alteration?’’

  ‘‘I don’t believe at all that it’s an immortal principle. I believe it can perfectly be destroyed. That’s what has happened to mine, which was a very good one to start with; and it’s you I have to thank for it. You are very bad,’’ Madame Merle added, gravely.

  ‘‘Is this the way we are to end?’’ Osmond asked, with the same studied coldness.

  ‘‘I don’t know how we are to end. I wish I did! How do bad people end? You have made me bad.’’

  ‘‘I don’t understand you. You seem to me quite good enough,’’ said Osmond, his conscious indifference giving an extreme effect to the words.

  Madame Merle’s self-possession tended on the contrary to diminish, and she was nearer losing it than on any occasion on which we have had the pleasure of meeting her. Her eye brightened, even flashed; her smile betrayed a painful effort. ‘‘Good enough for anything that I have done with myself? I suppose that’s what you mean.’’

  ‘‘Good enough to be always charming!’’ Osmond exclaimed, smiling too.

  ‘‘Oh God!’’ his companion murmured; and, sitting there in her ripe freshness, she had recourse to the same gesture that she had provoked on Isabel’s part in the morning; she bent her face and covered it with her hands.

  ‘‘Are you going to weep, after all?’’ Osmond asked; and on her remaining motionless he went on—‘‘Have I ever complained to you?’’

  She dropped her hands quickly. ‘‘No, you have taken your revenge otherwise—you have taken it on her.’’

  Osmond threw back his head further; he looked awhile at the ceiling, and might have been supposed to be appealing, in an informal way, to the heavenly powers. ‘‘Oh, the imagination of women! It’s always vulgar, at bottom. You talk of revenge like a third-rate novelist.’’

  ‘‘Of course you haven’t complained. You have enjoyed your triumph too much.’’

  ‘‘I am rather curious to know what you call my triumph.’’

  ‘‘You have made your wife afraid of you.’’

  Osmond changed his position; he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and looking awhile at a beautiful old Persian rug, at his feet. He had an air of refusing to accept any one’s valuation of anything, even of time, and of preferring to abide by his own; a peculiarity which made him at moments an irritating person to converse with. ‘‘Isabel is not afraid of me, and it’s not what I wish,’’ he said at last. ‘‘To what do you wish to provoke me when you say such things as that?’’

  ‘‘I have thought over all the harm you can do me,’’ Madame Merle answered. ‘‘Your wife was afraid of me this morning, but in me it was really you she feared.’’

  ‘‘You may have said things that were in very bad taste; I am not responsible for that. I didn’t see the use of your going to see her at all; you are capable of acting without her. I have not made you afraid of me, that I can see,’’ Osmond went on; ‘‘how then should I have made her? You are at least as brave. I can’t think where you have picked up such rubbish; one might suppose you knew me by this time.’’ He got up, as he spoke, and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the mantel, he continued: ‘‘You always see too much in everything; you overdo it; you lose sight of the real. I am much simpler than you think.’’

  ‘‘I think you are very simple.’’ And Madame Merle kept her eye upon her cup. ‘‘I have come to that with time. I judged you, as I say, of old; but it is only since your marriage that I have understood you. I have seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me. Please be very careful of that precious object.’’

  ‘‘It already has a small crack,’’ said Osmond dryly, as he put it down. ‘‘If you didn’t understand me before I married, it was cruelly rash of you to put me into such a box. However, I took a fancy to my box myself; I thought it would be a comfortable fit. I asked very little; I only asked that she should like me.’’

  ‘‘That she should like you so much!’’

  ‘‘So much, of course; in such a case one asks the maximum. That she should adore me, if you will. Oh yes, I wanted that.’’

  ‘‘I never adored you,’’ said Madame Merle.

  ‘‘Ah, but you pretended to!’’

  ‘‘It is true that you never accused me of being a comfortable fit,’’ Madame Merle went on.

  ‘‘My wife has declined—declined to do anything of the sort,’’ said Osmond. ‘‘If you are determined to make a tragedy of that, the tragedy is hardly for her.’’

  ‘‘The tragedy is for me!’’ Madame Merle exclaimed, rising, with a long low sigh, but giving a glance at the same time at the contents of her mantel-shelf. ‘‘It appears that I am to be severely taught the disadvantages of a false position.’’

  ‘‘You express yourself like a sentence in a copy-book. We must look for our comfort where we can find it. If my wife doesn’t like me, at least my child does. I shall look for compensations in Pansy. Fortunately I haven’t a fault to find with her.’’

  ‘‘Ah,’’ said Madame Merle, softly, ‘‘if I had a child—’’

  Osmond hesitated a moment; and then, with a little formal air—‘‘The children of others may be a great interest!’’ he announced.

  ‘‘You are more like a copy-book than I. There is something, after all, that holds us together.’’

  ‘‘Is it the idea of the harm I may do you?’’ Osmond asked.

  ‘‘No; it’s the idea of the good I may do for you. It is that,’’ said Madame Merle, ‘‘that made me so jealous of Isabel. I want it to be my work,’’ she added, with her face, which had grown hard and bitter, relaxing into its usual social expression.

  Osmond took up his hat and his umbrella, and after giving the former article two or three strokes with his coat-cuff—‘‘On the whole, I think,’’ he said, ‘‘you had better leave it to me.’’

  After he had left her, Madame Merle went and lifted from the mantel-shelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. ‘‘Have I been so vile all for nothing?’’ she murmured to herself.

  50

  AS the Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the ancient monuments, Isabel occasionally offered to introduce her to these interesting relics and to give their afternoon drive an antiquarian aim. The Countess, who professed to think her sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made an objection, and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if they had been mounds of modern drapery. She was not an antiquarian; but she was so delighted to be in Rome that she only desired to float with the current. She would gladly have passed an hour every day in the damp darkness of the Baths of Titus, if it had been a condition of her remaining at the Palazzo Roccanera. Isabel, however, was not a severe cicerone; she used to visit the ruins chiefly because they offered an excuse for talking about other matters than the love affairs of the ladies of Florence, as to which her companion was never weary of offering information. It must be added that during these visits the Countess was not very active; her preference was to sit in the carriage and exclaim that everything was most interesting. It was in this manner that she had hitherto examined the Coliseum, to the infinite regret of her niece, who—with all the respect that she owed her—could not see why she should not descend from the vehicle and enter the building. Pansy had so little chance to ramble that her view of the case was not wholly disinterested; it may be divined that she had a secret hope that, once inside, her aunt might be induced to climb to the upper tiers. There came a
day when the Countess announced her willingness to undertake this feat—a mild afternoon in March, when the windy month expressed itself in occasional puffs of spring. The three ladies went into the Coliseum together, but Isabel left her companions to wander over the place. She had often ascended to those desolate ledges from which the Roman crowd used to bellow applause, and where now the wild flowers (when they are allowed) bloom in the deep crevices; and to-day she felt weary, and preferred to sit in the despoiled arena. It made an intermission, too, for the Countess often asked more from one’s attention than she gave in return; and Isabel believed that when she was alone with her niece she let the dust gather for a moment upon the ancient scandals of Florence. She remained below, therefore, while Pansy guided her undiscriminating aunt to the steep brick staircase at the foot of which the custodian unlocks the tall wooden gate. The great enclosure was half in shadow; the western sun brought out the pale red tone of the great blocks of travertine—the latent colour which is the only living element in the immense ruin. Here and there wandered a peasant or a tourist, looking up at the far sky-line where in the clear stillness a multitude of swallows kept circling and plunging. Isabel presently became aware that one of the other visitors, planted in the middle of the arena, had turned his attention to her own person, and was looking at her with a certain little poise of the head, which she had some weeks before perceived to be characteristic of baffled but indestructible purpose. Such an attitude, to-day, could belong only to Mr. Edward Rosier; and this gentleman proved in fact to have been considering the question of speaking to her. When he had assured himself that she was unaccompanied he drew near, remarking that though she would not answer his letters she would perhaps not wholly close her ears to his spoken eloquence. She replied that her stepdaughter was close at hand and she could only give him five minutes; whereupon he took out his watch and sat down upon a broken block.