Chapter 26

Gilbert Osmond came to see Isabel again; that is he came to Palazzo Crescentini. He had other friends there as well, and to Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle he was always impartially civil; but the former of these ladies noted the fact that in the course of a fortnight he called five times, and compared it with another fact that she found no difficulty in remembering. Two visits a year had hitherto constituted his regular tribute to Mrs. Touchett’s worth, and she had never observed him select for such visits those moments, of almost periodical recurrence, when Madame Merle was under her roof. It was not for Madame Merle that he came; these two were old friends and he never put himself out for her. He was not fond of Ralph—Ralph had told her so—and it was not supposable that Mr. Osmond had suddenly taken a fancy to her son. Ralph was imperturbable—Ralph had a kind of loose-fitting urbanity that wrapped him about like an ill-made overcoat, but of which he never divested himself; he thought Mr. Osmond very good company and was willing at any time to look at him in the light of hospitality. But he didn’t flatter himself that the desire to repair a past injustice was the motive of their visitor’s calls; he read the situation more clearly. Isabel was the attraction, and in all conscience a sufficient one. Osmond was a critic, a student of the exquisite, and it was natural he should be curious of so rare an apparition. So when his mother observed to him that it was plain what Mr. Osmond was thinking of, Ralph replied that he was quite of her opinion. Mrs. Touchett had from far back found a place on her scant list for this gentleman, though wondering dimly by what art and what process—so negative and so wise as they were—he had everywhere effectively imposed himself. As he had never been an importunate visitor he had had no chance to be offensive, and he was recommended to her by his appearance of being as well able to do without her as she was to do without him—a quality that always, oddly enough, affected her as providing ground for a relation with her. It gave her no satisfaction, however, to think that he had taken it into his head to marry her niece. Such an alliance, on Isabel’s part, would have an air of almost morbid perversity. Mrs. Touchett easily remembered that the girl had refused an English peer; and that a young lady with whom Lord Warburton had not successfully wrestled should content herself with an obscure American dilettante, a middle-aged widower with an uncanny child and an ambiguous income, this answered to nothing in Mrs. Touchett’s conception of success. She took, it will be observed, not the sentimental, but the political, view of matrimony—a view which has always had much to recommend it. “I trust she won’t have the folly to listen to him,” she said to her son; to which Ralph replied that Isabel’s listening was one thing and Isabel’s answering quite another. He knew she had listened to several parties, as his father would have said, but had made them listen in return; and he found much entertainment in the idea that in these few months of his knowing her he should observe a fresh suitor at her gate. She had wanted to see life, and fortune was serving her to her taste; a succession of fine gentlemen going down on their knees to her would do as well as anything else. Ralph looked forward to a fourth, a fifth, a tenth besieger; he had no conviction she would stop at a third. She would keep the gate ajar and open a parley; she would certainly not allow number three to come in. He expressed this view, somewhat after this fashion, to his mother, who looked at him as if he had been dancing a jig. He had such a fanciful, pictorial way of saying things that he might as well address her in the deaf-mute’s alphabet.

“I don’t think I know what you mean,” she said; “you use too many figures of speech; I could never understand allegories. The two words in the language I most respect are Yes and No. If Isabel wants to marry Mr. Osmond she’ll do so in spite of all your comparisons. Let her alone to find a fine one herself for anything she undertakes. I know very little about the young man in America; I don’t think she spends much of her time in thinking of him, and I suspect he has got tired of waiting for her. There’s nothing in life to prevent her marrying Mr. Osmond if she only looks at him in a certain way. That’s all very well; no one approves more than I of one’s pleasing one’s self. But she takes her pleasure in such odd things; she’s capable of marrying Mr. Osmond for the beauty of his opinions or for his autograph of Michael Angelo. She wants to be disinterested: as if she were the only person who’s in danger of not being so! Will he be so disinterested when he has the spending of her money? That was her idea before your father’s death, and it has acquired new charms for her since. She ought to marry some one of whose disinterestedness she shall herself be sure; and there would be no such proof of that as his having a fortune of his own.”

“My dear mother, I’m not afraid,” Ralph answered. “She’s making fools of us all. She’ll please herself, of course; but she’ll do so by studying human nature at close quarters and yet retaining her liberty. She has started on an exploring expedition, and I don’t think she’ll change her course, at the outset, at a signal from Gilbert Osmond. She may have slackened speed for an hour, but before we know it she’ll be steaming away again. Excuse another metaphor.”

Mrs. Touchett excused it perhaps, but was not so much reassured as to withhold from Madame Merle the expression of her fears. “You who know everything,” she said, “you must know this: whether that curious creature’s really making love to my niece.”

“Gilbert Osmond?” Madame Merle widened her clear eyes and, with a full intelligence, “Heaven help us,” she exclaimed, “that’s an idea!”

“Hadn’t it occurred to you?”

“You make me feel an idiot, but I confess it hadn’t. I wonder,” she added, “if it has occurred to Isabel.”

“Oh, I shall now ask her,” said Mrs. Touchett.

Madame Merle reflected. “Don’t put it into her head. The thing would be to ask Mr. Osmond.”

“I can’t do that,” said Mrs. Touchett. “I won’t have him enquire of me—as he perfectly may with that air of his, given Isabel’s situation—what business it is of mine.”

“I’ll ask him myself,” Madame Merle bravely declared.

“But what business—for him—is it of yours?”

“It’s being none whatever is just why I can afford to speak. It’s so much less my business than any one’s else that he can put me off with anything he chooses. But it will be by the way he does this that I shall know.”

“Pray let me hear then,” said Mrs. Touchett, “of the fruits of your penetration. If I can’t speak to him, however, at least I can speak to Isabel.”

Her companion sounded at this the note of warning. “Don’t be too quick with her. Don’t inflame her imagination.”

“I never did anything in life to any one’s imagination. But I’m always sure of her doing something—well, not of my kind.”

“No, you wouldn’t like this,” Madame Merle observed without the point of interrogation.

“Why in the world should I, pray? Mr. Osmond has nothing the least solid to offer.”

Again Madame Merle was silent while her thoughtful smile drew up her mouth even more charmingly than usual toward the left corner. “Let us distinguish. Gilbert Osmond’s certainly not the first comer. He’s a man who in favourable conditions might very well make a great impression. He has made a great impression, to my knowledge, more than once.”

“Don’t tell me about his probably quite cold-blooded love-affairs; they’re nothing to me!” Mrs. Touchett cried. “What you say’s precisely why I wish he would cease his visits. He has nothing in the world that I know of but a dozen or two of early masters and a more or less pert little daughter.”

“The early masters are now worth a good deal of money,” said Madame Merle, “and the daughter’s a very young and very innocent and very harmless person.”

“In other words she’s an insipid little chit. Is that what you mean? Having no fortune she can’t hope to marry as they marry here; so that Isabel will have to furnish her either with a maintenance or with a dowry.”

“Isabel probably wouldn’t object to being kind to her. I think she likes the poor child.”

“Another reason then for Mr. Osmond’s stopping at home! Otherwise, a week hence, we shall have my niece arriving at the conviction that her mission in life’s to prove that a stepmother may sacrifice herself—and that, to prove it, she must first become one.”

“She would make a charming stepmother,” smiled Madame Merle; “but I quite agree with you that she had better not decide upon her mission too hastily. Changing the form of one’s mission’s almost as difficult as changing the shape of one’s nose: there they are, each, in the middle of one’s face and one’s character—one has to begin too far back. But I’ll investigate and report to you.”

All this went on quite over Isabel’s head; she had no suspicions that her relations with Mr. Osmond were being discussed. Madame Merle had said nothing to put her on her guard; she alluded no more pointedly to him than to the other gentlemen of Florence, native and foreign, who now arrived in considerable numbers to pay their respects to Miss Archer’s aunt. Isabel thought him interesting—she came back to that; she liked so to think of him. She had carried away an image from her visit to his hill-top which her subsequent knowledge of him did nothing to efface and which put on for her a particular harmony with other supposed and divined things, histories within histories: the image of a quiet, clever, sensitive, distinguished man, strolling on a moss-grown terrace above the sweet Val d’Arno and holding by the hand a little girl whose bell-like clearness gave a new grace to childhood. The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly; of the choice between objects, subjects, contacts—what might she call them?—of a thin and those of a rich association; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden—allowing only for arid places freshened by the natural dews of a quaint half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood. At Palazzo Crescentini Mr. Osmond’s manner remained the same; diffident at first—oh self-conscious beyond doubt! and full of the effort (visible only to a sympathetic eye) to overcome this disadvantage; an effort which usually resulted in a great deal of easy, lively, very positive, rather aggressive, always suggestive talk. Mr. Osmond’s talk was not injured by the indication of an eagerness to shine; Isabel found no difficulty in believing that a person was sincere who had so many of the signs of strong conviction—as for instance an explicit and graceful appreciation of anything that might be said on his own side of the question, said perhaps by Miss Archer in especial. What continued to please this young woman was that while he talked so for amusement he didn’t talk, as she had heard people, for “effect.” He uttered his ideas as if, odd as they often appeared, he were used to them and had lived with them; old polished knobs and heads and handles, of precious substance, that could be fitted if necessary to new walking-sticks—not switches plucked in destitution from the common tree and then too elegantly waved about. One day he brought his small daughter with him, and she rejoiced to renew acquaintance with the child, who, as she presented her forehead to be kissed by every member of the circle, reminded her vividly of an ingenue in a French play. Isabel had never seen a little person of this pattern; American girls were very different—different too were the maidens of England. Pansy was so formed and finished for her tiny place in the world, and yet in imagination, as one could see, so innocent and infantine. She sat on the sofa by Isabel; she wore a small grenadine mantle and a pair of the useful gloves that Madame Merle had given her—little grey gloves with a single button. She was like a sheet of blank paper—the ideal jeune fille of foreign fiction. Isabel hoped that so fair and smooth a page would be covered with an edifying text.

The Countess Gemini also came to call upon her, but the Countess was quite another affair. She was by no means a blank sheet; she had been written over in a variety of hands, and Mrs. Touchett, who felt by no means honoured by her visit, pronounced that a number of unmistakeable blots were to be seen upon her surface. The Countess gave rise indeed to some discussion between the mistress of the house and the visitor from Rome, in which Madame Merle (who was not such a fool as to irritate people by always agreeing with them) availed herself felicitously enough of that large licence of dissent which her hostess permitted as freely as she practised it. Mrs. Touchett had declared it a piece of audacity that this highly compromised character should have presented herself at such a time of day at the door of a house in which she was esteemed so little as she must long have known herself to be at Palazzo Crescentini. Isabel had been made acquainted with the estimate prevailing under that roof: it represented Mr. Osmond’s sister as a lady who had so mismanaged her improprieties that they had ceased to hang together at all—which was at the least what one asked of such matters—and had become the mere floating fragments of a wrecked renown, incommoding social circulation. She had been married by her mother—a more administrative person, with an appreciation of foreign titles which the daughter, to do her justice, had probably by this time thrown off—to an Italian nobleman who had perhaps given her some excuse for attempting to quench the consciousness of outrage. The Countess, however, had consoled herself outrageously, and the list of her excuses had now lost itself in the labyrinth of her adventures. Mrs. Touchett had never consented to receive her, though the Countess had made overtures of old. Florence was not an austere city; but, as Mrs. Touchett said, she had to draw the line somewhere.