Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Tragic Muse & Daisy Miller (4 Books in One Edition). Henry Foss James
see Madame Catherine? He told me he would if he had time. Perhaps he had not time. Papa likes a great deal of time. He wished to speak about my education; it isn’t finished yet, you know. I don’t know what they can do with me more; but it appears it’s far from finished. Papa told me one day he thought he would finish it himself; for the last year or two, at the convent, the masters that teach the tall girls are so very dear. Papa’s not rich, and I should be very sorry if he were to pay much money for me, because I don’t think I’m worth it. I don’t learn quickly enough, and I have no memory. For what I’m told, yes — especially when it’s pleasant; but not for what I learn in a book. There was a young girl who was my best friend, and they took her away from the convent, when she was fourteen, to make — how do you say it in English?— to make a dot. You don’t say it in English? I hope it isn’t wrong; I only mean they wished to keep the money to marry her. I don’t know whether it is for that that papa wishes to keep the money — to marry me. It costs so much to marry!” Pansy went on with a sigh; “I think papa might make that economy. At any rate I’m too young to think about it yet, and I don’t care for any gentleman; I mean for any but him. If he were not my papa I should like to marry him; I would rather be his daughter than the wife of — of some strange person. I miss him very much, but not so much as you might think, for I’ve been so much away from him. Papa has always been principally for holidays. I miss Madame Catherine almost more; but you must not tell him that. You shall not see him again? I’m very sorry, and he’ll be sorry too. Of everyone who comes here I like you the best. That’s not a great compliment, for there are not many people. It was very kind of you to come to-day — so far from your house; for I’m really as yet only a child. Oh, yes, I’ve only the occupations of a child. When did YOU give them up, the occupations of a child? I should like to know how old you are, but I don’t know whether it’s right to ask. At the convent they told us that we must never ask the age. I don’t like to do anything that’s not expected; it looks as if one had not been properly taught. I myself — I should never like to be taken by surprise. Papa left directions for everything. I go to bed very early. When the sun goes off that side I go into the garden. Papa left strict orders that I was not to get scorched. I always enjoy the view; the mountains are so graceful. In Rome, from the convent, we saw nothing but roofs and bell-towers. I practise three hours. I don’t play very well. You play yourself? I wish very much you’d play something for me; papa has the idea that I should hear good music. Madame Merle has played for me several times; that’s what I like best about Madame Merle; she has great facility. I shall never have facility. And I’ve no voice — just a small sound like the squeak of a slate-pencil making flourishes.”
Isabel gratified this respectful wish, drew off her gloves and sat down to the piano, while Pansy, standing beside her, watched her white hands move quickly over the keys. When she stopped she kissed the child good-bye, held her close, looked at her long. “Be very good,” she said; “give pleasure to your father.”
“I think that’s what I live for,” Pansy answered. “He has not much pleasure; he’s rather a sad man.”
Isabel listened to this assertion with an interest which she felt it almost a torment to be obliged to conceal. It was her pride that obliged her, and a certain sense of decency; there were still other things in her head which she felt a strong impulse, instantly checked, to say to Pansy about her father; there were things it would have given her pleasure to hear the child, to make the child, say. But she no sooner became conscious of these things than her imagination was hushed with horror at the idea of taking advantage of the little girl — it was of this she would have accused herself — and of exhaling into that air where he might still have a subtle sense for it any breath of her charmed state. She had come — she had come; but she had stayed only an hour. She rose quickly from the music-stool; even then, however, she lingered a moment, still holding her small companion, drawing the child’s sweet slimness closer and looking down at her almost in envy. She was obliged to confess it to herself — she would have taken a passionate pleasure in talking of Gilbert Osmond to this innocent, diminutive creature who was so near him. But she said no other word; she only kissed Pansy once again. They went together through the vestibule, to the door that opened on the court; and there her young hostess stopped, looking rather wistfully beyond. “I may go no further. I’ve promised papa not to pass this door.”
“You’re right to obey him; he’ll never ask you anything unreasonable.”
“I shall always obey him. But when will you come again?”
“Not for a long time, I’m afraid.”
“As soon as you can, I hope. I’m only a little girl,” said Pansy, “but I shall always expect you.” And the small figure stood in the high, dark doorway, watching Isabel cross the clear, grey court and disappear into the brightness beyond the big portone, which gave a wider dazzle as it opened.
Chapter XXXI
Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during this interval that we are closely concerned with her; our attention is engaged again on a certain day in the late spring-time, shortly after her return to Palazzo Crescentini and a year from the date of the incidents just narrated. She was alone on this occasion, in one of the smaller of the numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses, and there was that in her expression and attitude which would have suggested that she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open, and though its green shutters were partly drawn the bright air of the garden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with warmth and perfume. Our young woman stood near it for some time, her hands clasped behind her; she gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest. Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle. Yet it could not be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged, she would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before. She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined themselves to retrospect, instead of fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would have evoked a multitude of interesting pictures. These pictures would have been both landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have been the more numerous. With several of the images that might have been projected on such a field we are already acquainted. There would be for instance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine’s sister and Edmund Ludlow’s wife, who had come out from New York to spend five months with her relative. She had left her husband behind her, but had brought her children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and tenderness the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had been able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossing the ocean with extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladies in Paris before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet, even from the American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age; so that while her sister was with her Isabel had confined her movements to a narrow circle. Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland in the month of July, and they had spent a summer of fine weather in an Alpine valley where the flowers were thick in the meadows and the shade of great chestnuts made a resting-place for such upward wanderings as might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. They had afterwards reached the French capital, which was worshipped, and with costly ceremonies, by Lily, but thought of as noisily vacant by Isabel, who in these days made use of her memory of Rome as she might have done, in a hot and crowded room, of a phial of something pungent hidden in her handkerchief.
Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts and wonderments not allayed at that altar;