Chapter XXIX
Ralph Touchett, in talk with his excellent friend, had rather markedly qualified, as we know, his recognition of Gilbert Osmond’s personal merits; but he might really have felt himself illiberal in the light of that gentleman’s conduct during the rest of the visit to Rome. Osmond spent a portion of each day with Isabel and her companions, and ended by affecting them as the easiest of men to live with. Who wouldn’t have seen that he could command, as it were, both tact and gaiety? — which perhaps was exactly why Ralph had made his old-time look of superficial sociability a reproach to him. Even Isabel’s invidious kinsman was obliged to admit that he was just now a delightful associate. His good humour was imperturbable, his knowledge of the right fact, his production of the right word, as convenient as the friendly flicker of a match for your cigarette. Clearly he was amused — as amused as a man could be who was so little ever surprised, and that made him almost applausive. It was not that his spirits were visibly high — he would never, in the concert of pleasure, touch the big drum by so much as a knuckle: he had a mortal dislike to the high, ragged note, to what he called random ravings. He thought Miss Archer sometimes of too precipitate a readiness. It was pity she had that fault, because if she had not had it she would really have had none; she would have been as smooth to his general need of her as handled ivory to the palm. If he was not personally loud, however, he was deep, and during these closing days of the Roman May he knew a complacency that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles. He was pleased with everything; he had never before been pleased with so many things at once. Old impressions, old enjoyments, renewed themselves; one evening, going home to his room at the inn, he wrote down a little sonnet to which he prefixed the title of “Rome Revisited.” A day or two later he showed this piece of correct and ingenious verse to Isabel, explaining to her that it was an Italian fashion to commemorate the occasions of life by a tribute to the muse.
He took his pleasures in general singly; he was too often — he would have admitted that — too sorely aware of something wrong, something ugly; the fertilising dew of a conceivable felicity too seldom descended on his spirit. But at present he was happy — happier than he had perhaps ever been in his life, and the feeling had a large foundation. This was simply the sense of success — the most agreeable emotion of the human heart. Osmond had never had too much of it; in this respect he had the irritation of satiety, as he knew perfectly well and often reminded himself. “Ah no, I’ve not been spoiled; certainly I’ve not been spoiled,” he used inwardly to repeat. “If I do succeed before I die I shall thoroughly have earned it.” He was too apt to reason as if “earning” this boon consisted above all of covertly aching for it and might be confined to that exercise. Absolutely void of it, also, his career had not been; he might indeed have suggested to a spectator here and there that he was resting on vague laurels. But his triumphs were, some of them, now too old; others had been too easy. The present one had been less arduous than might have been expected, but had been easy — that is had been rapid — only because he had made an altogether exceptional effort, a greater effort than he had believed it in him to make. The desire to have something or other to show for his “parts”— to show somehow or other — had been the dream of his youth; but as the years went on the conditions attached to any marked proof of rarity had affected him more and more as gross and detestable; like the swallowing of mugs of beer to advertise what one could “stand.” If an anonymous drawing on a museum wall had been conscious and watchful it might have known this peculiar pleasure of being at last and all of a sudden identified — as from the hand of a great master — by the so high and so unnoticed fact of style. His “style” was what the girl had discovered with a little help; and now, beside herself enjoying it, she should publish it to the world without his having any of the trouble. She should do the thing FOR him, and he would not have waited in vain.
Shortly before the time fixed in advance for her departure this young lady received from Mrs. Touchett a telegram running as follows: “Leave Florence 4th June for Bellaggio, and take you if you have not other views. But can’t wait if you dawdle in Rome.” The dawdling in Rome was very pleasant, but Isabel had different views, and she let her aunt know she would immediately join her. She told Gilbert Osmond that she had done so, and he replied that, spending many of his summers as well as his winters in Italy, he himself would loiter a little longer in the cool shadow of Saint Peter’s. He would not return to Florence for ten days more, and in that time she would have started for Bellaggio. It might be months in this case before he should see her again. This exchange took place in the large decorated sitting-room occupied by our friends at the hotel; it was late in the evening, and Ralph Touchett was to take his cousin back to Florence on the morrow. Osmond had found the girl alone; Miss Stackpole had contracted a friendship with a delightful American family on the fourth floor and had mounted the interminable staircase to pay them a visit. Henrietta contracted friendships, in travelling, with great freedom, and had formed in railway-carriages several that were among her most valued ties. Ralph was making arrangements for the morrow’s journey, and Isabel sat alone in a wilderness of yellow upholstery. The chairs and sofas were orange; the walls and windows were draped in purple and gilt. The mirrors, the pictures had great flamboyant frames; the ceiling was deeply vaulted and painted over with naked muses and cherubs. For Osmond the place was ugly to distress; the false colours, the sham splendour were like vulgar, bragging, lying talk. Isabel had taken in hand a volume of Ampere, presented, on their arrival in Rome, by Ralph; but though she held it in her lap with her finger vaguely kept in the place she was not impatient to pursue her study. A lamp covered with a drooping veil of pink tissue-paper burned on the table beside her and diffused a strange pale rosiness over the scene.
“You say you’ll come back; but who knows?” Gilbert Osmond said.
“I think you’re much more likely to start on your voyage round the world. You’re under no obligation to come back; you can do exactly what you choose; you can roam through space.”
“Well, Italy’s a part of space,” Isabel answered. “I can take it on the way.”
“On the way round the world? No, don’t do that. Don’t put us in a parenthesis — give us a chapter to ourselves. I don’t want to see you on your travels. I’d rather see you when they’re over. I should like to see you when you’re tired and satiated,” Osmond added in a moment. “I shall prefer you in that state.”
Isabel, with her eyes bent, fingered the pages of M. Ampere. “You turn things into ridicule without seeming to do it, though not, I think, without intending it. You’ve no respect for my travels — you think them ridiculous.”
“Where do you find that?”
She went on in the same tone, fretting the edge of her book with the paper-knife. “You see my ignorance, my blunders, the way I wander about as if the world belonged to me, simply because — because it has been put into my power to do so. You don’t think a woman ought to do that. You think it bold and ungraceful.”
“I think it beautiful,” said Osmond. “You know my opinions — I’ve treated you to enough of them. Don’t you remember my telling you that one ought to make one’s life a work of art? You looked rather shocked at first; but then I told you that it was exactly what you seemed to me to be trying to do with your own.”
She looked up from her book. “What you despise most in the world is bad, is stupid art.”
“Possibly. But yours seem to me very clear and very good.”
“If I were to go to Japan next winter you would laugh at me,” she went on.
Osmond gave a smile — a keen one, but not a laugh, for the tone of their conversation was not jocose. Isabel had in fact her solemnity; he had seen it before. “You have one!”
“That’s exactly what I say. You think such an idea absurd.”
“I would give my little finger to go to Japan; it’s one of the countries I want most to see. Can’t you believe that, with my taste for old lacquer?”
“I haven’t a taste for old lacquer to excuse me,” said Isabel.
“You’ve a better excuse — the means of going. You’re quite wrong in your theory that I laugh at you. I don’t know what has put it into your head.”
“It wouldn’t be remarkable if you did think it ridiculous that I should have the means to travel when you’ve not; for you know everything and I know nothing.”
“The more reason why you should travel and learn,” smiled Osmond. “Besides,” he added as if it were a point to be made, “I don’t know everything.”
Isabel was not struck with the oddity of his saying this gravely; she was thinking that the pleasantest incident of her life — so it pleased her to qualify these too few days in Rome, which she might musingly have likened to the figure of some small princess of one of the ages of dress overmuffled in a mantle of state and dragging a train that it took pages or historians to hold up — that this felicity was coming to an end. That most of the interest of the time had been owing to Mr. Osmond was a reflexion she was not just now at pai............