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“Ah, you needn’t wait! Ralph will light my candle,” Isabel gaily engaged.
“I’ll light your candle; do let me light your candle, Miss Archer!” Lord Warburton exclaimed. “Only I beg it shall not be before midnight.”
Mrs. Touchett fixed her bright little eyes upon him a moment and transferred them coldly to her niece. “You can’t stay alone with the gentlemen. You’re not—you’re not at your blest Albany, my dear.”
Isabel rose, blushing. “I wish I were,” she said.
“Oh, I say, mother!” Ralph broke out.
“My dear Mrs. Touchett!” Lord Warburton murmured.
“I didn’t make your country, my lord,” Mrs. Touchett said majestically. “I must take it as I find it.”
“Can’t I stay with my own cousin?” Isabel enquired.
“I’m not aware that Lord Warburton is your cousin.”
“Perhaps I had better go to bed!” the visitor suggested. “That will arrange it.”
Mrs. Touchett gave a little look of despair and sat down again. “Oh, if it’s necessary I’ll stay up till midnight.”
Ralph meanwhile handed Isabel her candlestick. He had been watching her; it had seemed to him her temper was involved—an accident that might be interesting. But if he had expected anything of a flare he was disappointed, for the girl simply laughed a little, nodded good-night and withdrew accompanied by her aunt. For himself he was annoyed at his mother, though he thought she was right. Above-stairs the two ladies separated at Mrs. Touchett’s door. Isabel had said nothing on her way up.
“Of course you’re vexed at my interfering with you,” said Mrs. Touchett.
Isabel considered. “I’m not vexed, but I’m surprised—and a good deal mystified. Wasn’t it proper I should remain in the drawing-room?”
“Not in the least. Young girls here—in decent houses—don’t sit alone with the gentlemen late at night.”
“You were very right to tell me then,” said Isabel. “I don’t understand it, but I’m very glad to know it.”
“I shall always tell you,” her aunt answered, “whenever I see you taking what seems to me too much liberty.”
“Pray do; but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just.”
“Very likely not. You’re too fond of your own ways.”
“Yes, I think I’m very fond of them. But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.”
“So as to do them?” asked her aunt.
“So as to choose,” said Isabel.
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_a8c7d2c1-520d-5df1-9108-3a487a218a2e)
As she was devoted to romantic effects Lord Warburton ventured to express a hope that she would come some day and see his house, a very curious old place. He extracted from Mrs. Touchett a promise that she would bring her niece to Lockleigh, and Ralph signified his willingness to attend the ladies if his father should be able to spare him. Lord Warburton assured our heroine that in the mean time his sisters would come and see her. She knew something about his sisters, having sounded him, during the hours they spent together while he was at Gardencourt, on many points connected with his family. When Isabel was interested she asked a great many questions, and as her companion was a copious talker she urged him on this occasion by no means in vain. He told her he had four sisters and two brothers and had lost both his parents. The brothers and sisters were very good people—“not particularly clever, you know,” he said, “but very decent and pleasant;” and he was so good as to hope Miss Archer might know them well. One of the brothers was in the Church, settled in the family living, that of Lockleigh, which was a heavy, sprawling parish, and was an excellent fellow in spite of his thinking differently from himself on every conceivable topic. And then Lord Warburton mentioned some of the opinions held by his brother, which were opinions Isabel had often heard expressed and that she supposed to be entertained by a considerable portion of the human family. Many of them indeed she supposed she had held herself, till he assured her she was quite mistaken, that it was really impossible, that she had doubtless imagined she entertained them, but that she might depend that, if she thought them over a little, she would find there was nothing in them. When she answered that she had already thought several of the questions involved over very attentively he declared that she was only another example of what he had often been struck with—the fact that, of all the people in the world, the Americans were the most grossly superstitious. They were rank Tories and bigots, every one of them; there were no conservatives like American conservatives. Her uncle and her cousin were there to prove it; nothing could be more medieval than many of their views; they had ideas that people in England nowadays were ashamed to confess to; and they had the impudence moreover, said his lordship, laughing, to pretend they knew more about the needs and dangers of this poor dear stupid old England than he who was born in it and owned a considerable slice of it—the more shame to him! From all of which Isabel gathered that Lord Warburton was a nobleman of the newest pattern, a reformer, a radical, a contemner of ancient ways. His other brother, who was in the army in India, was rather wild and pig-headed and had not been of much use as yet but to make debts for Warburton to pay—one of the most precious privileges of an elder brother. “I don’t think I shall pay any more,” said her friend; “he lives a monstrous deal better than I do, enjoys unheard-of luxuries and thinks himself a much finer gentleman than I. As I’m a consistent radical I go in only for equality; I don’t go in for the superiority of the younger brothers.” Two of his four sisters, the second and fourth, were married, one of them having done very well, as they said, the other only so-so. The husband of the elder, Lord Haycock, was a very good fellow, but unfortunately a horrid Tory; and his wife, like all good English wives, was worse than her husband. The other had espoused a smallish squire in Norfolk and, though married but the other day, had already five children. This information and much more Lord Warburton imparted to his young American listener, taking pains to make many things clear and to lay bare to her apprehension the peculiarities of English life. Isabel was often amused at his explicitness and at the small allowance he seemed to make either for her own experience or for her imagination. “He thinks I’m a barbarian,” she said, “and that I’ve never seen forks and spoons;” and she used to ask him artless questions for the pleasure of hearing him answer seriously. Then when he had fallen into the trap, “It’s a pity you can’t see me in my war-paint and feathers,” she remarked; “if I had known how kind you are to the poor savages I would have brought over my native costume!” Lord Warburton had travelled through the United States and knew much more about them than Isabel; he was so good as to say that America was the most charming country in the world, but his recollections of it appeared to encourage the idea that Americans in England would need to have a great many things explained to them. “If I had only had you to explain things to me in America!” he said. “I was rather puzzled in your country; in fact I was quite bewildered, and the trouble was that the explanations only puzzled me more. You know I think they often gave me the wrong ones on purpose; they’re rather clever about that over there. But when I explain you can trust me; about what I tell you there’s no mistake.” There was no mistake at least about his being very intelligent and cultivated and knowing almost everything in the world. Although he gave the most interesting and thrilling glimpses Isabel felt he never did it to exhibit himself, and though he had had rare chances and had tumbled in, as she put it, for high prizes, he was as far as possible from making a merit of it. He had enjoyed the best things of life, but they had not spoiled his sense of proportion. His quality was a mixture of the effect of rich experience—oh, so easily come by!—with a modesty at times almost boyish; the sweet and wholesome savour of which—it was as agreeable as something tasted—lost nothing from the addition of a tone of responsible kindness.
“I like your specimen English gentleman very much,” Isabel said to Ralph after Lord Warburton had gone.
“I like him too—I love him well,” Ralph returned. “But I pity him more.”
Isabel looked at him askance. “Why, that seems to me his only fault—that one can’t pity him a little. He appears to have everything, to know everything, to be everything.”
“Oh, he’s in a bad way!” Ralph insisted.
“I suppose you don’t mean in health?”
“No, as to that he’s detestably sound. What I mean is that he’s a man with a great position who’s playing all sorts of tricks with it. He doesn’t take himself seriously.”
“Does he regard himself as a joke?”
“Much worse; he regards himself as an imposition—as an abuse.”
“Well, perhaps he is,” said Isabel.
“Perhaps he is—though on the whole I don’t think so. But in that case what’s more pitiable than a sentient, self-conscious abuse planted by other hands, deeply rooted but aching with a sense of its injustice? For me, in his place, I could be as solemn as a statue of Buddha. He occupies a position that appeals to my imagination. Great responsibilities, great opportunities, great consideration, great wealth, great power, a natural share in the public affairs of a great country. But he’s all in a muddle about himself, his position, his power, and indeed about everything in the world. He’s the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know what to believe in. When I attempt to tell him (because if I were he I know very well what I should believe in) he calls me a pampered bigot. I believe he seriously thinks me an awful Philistine; he says I don’t understand my time. I understand it certainly better than he, who can neither abolish himself as a nuisance nor maintain himself as an institution.”
“He doesn’t look very wretched,” Isabel observed.
“Possibly not; though, being a man of a good deal of charming taste, I think he often has uncomfortable hours. But what is it to say of a being of his opportunities that he’s not miserable? Besides, I believe he is.”
“I don’t,” said Isabel.
“Well,” her cousin rejoined, “if he isn’t he ought to be!”
In the afternoon she spent an hour with her uncle on the lawn, where the old man sat, as usual, with his shawl over his legs and his large cup of diluted tea in his hands. In the course of conversation he asked her what she thought of their late visitor.
Isabel was prompt. “I think he’s charming.”
“He’s a nice person,” said Mr. Touchett, “but I don’t recommend you to fall in love with him.”
“I shall not do it then; I shall never fall in love but on your recommendation. Moreover,” Isabel added, “my cousin gives me rather a sad account of Lord Warburton.”
“Oh, indeed? I don’t know what there may be to say, but you must remember that Ralph must talk.”
“He thinks your friend’s too subversive—or not subversive enough! I don’t quite understand which,” said Isabel.
The old man shook his head slowly, smiled and put down his cup. “I don’t know which either. He goes very far, but it’s quite possible he doesn’t go far enough. He seems to want to do away with a good many things, but he seems to want to remain himself. I suppose that’s natural, but it’s rather inconsistent.”
“Oh, I hope he’ll remain himself,” said Isabel. “If he were to be done away with his friends would miss him sadly.”
“Well,” said the old man, “I guess he’ll stay and amuse his friends. I should certainly miss him very much here at Gardencourt. He always amuses me when he comes over, and I think he amuses himself as well. There’s a considerable number like him, round in society; they’re very fashionable just now. I don’t know what they’re trying to do—whether they’re trying to get up a revolution. I hope at any rate they’ll put it off till after I’m gone. You see they want to disestablish everything; but I’m a pretty big landowner here, and I don’t want to be disestablished. I wouldn’t have come over if I had thought they were going to behave like that,” Mr. Touchett went on with expanding hilarity. “I came over because I thought England was a safe country. I call it a regular fraud if they are going to introduce any considerable changes; there’ll be a large number disappointed in that case.”
“Oh, I do hope they’ll make a revolution!” Isabel exclaimed. “I should delight in seeing a revolution.”
“Let me see,” said her uncle, with a humorous intention; “I forget whether you’re on the side of the old or on the side of the new. I’ve heard you take such opposite views.”
“I’m on the side of both. I guess I’m a little on the side of everything. In a revolution—after it was well begun—I think I should be a high, proud loyalist. One sympathises more with them, and they’ve a chance to behave so exquisitely. I mean so picturesquely.”
“I don’t know that I understand what you mean by behaving picturesquely, but it seems to me that you do that always, my dear.”
“Oh, you lovely man, if I could believe that!” the girl interrupted.
“I’m afraid, after all, you won’t have the pleasure of going gracefully to the guillotine here just now,” Mr. Touchett went on. “If you want to see a big outbreak you must pay us a long visit. You see, when you come to the point it wouldn’t suit them to be taken at their word.”
“Of whom are you speaking?”
“Well, I mean Lord Warburton and his friends—the radicals of the upper class. Of course I only know the way it strikes me. They talk about the changes, but I don’t think they quite realise. You and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first. And then I ain’t a lord; you’re a lady, my dear, but I ain’t a lord. Now over here I don’t think it quite comes home to them. It’s a matter of every day and every hour, and I don’t think many of them would find it as pleasant as what they’ve got. Of course if they want to try, it’s their own business; but I expect they won’t try very hard.”
“Don’t you think they’re sincere?” Isabel asked.
“Well, they want to FEEL earnest,” Mr. Touchett allowed; “but it seems as if they took it out in theories mostly. Their radical views are a kind of amusement; they’ve got to have some amusement, and they might have coarser tastes than that. You see they’re very luxurious, and these progressive ideas are about their biggest luxury. They make them feel moral and yet don’t damage their position. They think a great deal of their position; don’t let one of them ever persuade you he doesn’t, for if you were to proceed on that basis you’d be pulled up very short.”
Isabel followed her uncle’s argument, which he unfolded with his quaint distinctness, most attentively, and though she was unacquainted with the British aristocracy she found it in harmony with her general impressions of human nature. But she felt moved to put in a protest on Lord Warburton’s behalf. “I don’t believe Lord Warburton’s a humbug; I don’t care what the others are. I should like to see Lord Warburton put to the test.”
“Heaven deliver me from my friends!” Mr. Touchett answered. “Lord Warburton’s a very amiable young man—a very fine young man. He has a hundred thousand a year. He owns fifty thousand acres of the soil of this little island and ever so many other things besides. He has half a dozen houses to live in. He has a seat in Parliament as I have one at my own dinner-table. He has elegant tastes—cares for literature, for art, for science, for charming young ladies. The most elegant is his taste for the new views. It affords him a great deal of pleasure—more perhaps than anything else, except the young ladies. His old house over there—what does he call it, Lockleigh?—is very attractive; but I don’t think it’s as pleasant as this. That doesn’t matter, however—he has so many others. His views don’t hurt any one as far as I can see; they certainly don’t hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution he would come off very easily. They wouldn’t touch him, they’d leave him as he is: he’s too much liked.”
“Ah, he couldn’t be a martyr even if he wished!” Isabel sighed. “That’s a very poor position.”
“He’ll never be a martyr unless you make him one,” said the old man.
Isabel shook her head; there might have been something laughable in the fact that she did it with a touch of melancholy. “I shall never make any one a martyr.”
“You’ll never be one, I hope.”
“I hope not. But you don’t pity Lord Warburton then as Ralph does?”
Her uncle looked at her a while with genial acuteness. “Yes, I do, after all!”
CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_e3bcdc4b-1e37-55b9-aad5-cdffb3bc990c)
The two Misses Molyneux, this nobleman’s sisters, came presently to call upon her, and Isabel took a fancy to the young ladies, who appeared to her to show a most original stamp. It is true that when she described them to her cousin by that term he declared that no epithet could be less applicable than this to the two Misses Molyneux, since there were fifty thousand young women in England who exactly resembled them. Deprived of this advantage, however, Isabel’s visitors retained that of an extreme sweetness and shyness of demeanour, and of having, as she thought, eyes like the balanced basins, the circles of “ornamental water”, set, in parterres, among the geraniums.
“They’re not morbid, at any rate, whatever they are,” our heroine said to herself; and she deemed this a great charm, for two or three of the friends of her girlhood had been regrettably open to the charge (they would have been so nice without it), to say nothing of Isabel’s having occasionally suspected it as a tendency of her own. The Misses Molyneux were not in their first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions and something of the smile of childhood. Yes, their eyes, which Isabel admired, were round, quiet and contented, and their figures, also of a generous roundness, were encased in sealskin jackets. Their friendliness was great, so great that they were almost embarrassed to show it; they seemed somewhat afraid of the young lady from the other side of the world and rather looked than spoke their good wishes. But they made it clear to her that they hoped she would come to luncheon at Lockleigh, where they lived with their brother, and then they might see her very, very often. They wondered if she wouldn’t come over some day, and sleep: they were expecting some people on the twenty-ninth, so perhaps she would come while the people were there.
“I’m afraid it isn’t any one very remarkable,” said the elder sister; “but I dare say you’ll take us as you find us.”
“I shall find you delightful; I think you’re enchanting just as you are,” replied Isabel, who often praised profusely.
Her visitors flushed, and her cousin told her, after they were gone, that if she said such things to those poor girls they would think she was in some wild, free manner practising on them: he was sure it was the first time they had been called enchanting.
“I can’t help it,” Isabel answered. “I think it’s lovely to be so quiet and reasonable and satisfied. I should like to be like that.”
“Heaven forbid!” cried Ralph with ardour.
“I mean to try and imitate them,” said Isabel. “I want very much to see them at home.”
She had this pleasure a few days later, when, with Ralph and his mother, she drove over to Lockleigh. She found the Misses Molyneux sitting in a vast drawing-room (she perceived afterwards it was one of several) in a wilderness of faded chintz; they were dressed on this occasion in black velveteen. Isabel liked them even better at home than she had done at Gardencourt, and was more than ever struck with the fact that they were not morbid. It had seemed to her before that if they had a fault it was a want of play of mind; but she presently saw they were capable of deep emotion. Before luncheon she was alone with them for some time, on one side of the room, while Lord Warburton, at a distance, talked to Mrs. Touchett.
“Is it true your brother’s such a great radical?” Isabel asked. She knew it was true, but we have seen that her interest in human nature was keen, and she had a desire to draw the Misses Molyneux out.
“Oh dear, yes; he’s immensely advanced,” said Mildred, the younger sister.
“At the same time Warburton’s very reasonable,” Miss Molyneux observed.
Isabel watched him a moment at the other side of the room; he was clearly trying hard to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Touchett. Ralph had met the frank advances of one of the dogs before the fire that the temperature of an English August, in the ancient expanses, had not made an impertinence. “Do you suppose your brother’s sincere?” Isabel enquired with a smile.
“Oh, he must be, you know!” Mildred exclaimed quickly, while the elder sister gazed at our heroine in silence.
“Do you think he would stand the test?”
“The test?”
“I mean for instance having to give up all this.”
“Having to give up Lockleigh?” said Miss Molyneux, finding her voice.
“Yes, and the other places; what are they called?”
The two sisters exchanged an almost frightened glance. “Do you mean—do you mean on account of the expense?” the younger one asked.
“I dare say he might let one or two of his houses,” said the other.
“Let them for nothing?” Isabel demanded.
“I can’t fancy his giving up his property,” said Miss Molyneux.
“Ah, I’m afraid he is an impostor!” Isabel returned. “Don’t you think it’s a false position?”
Her companions, evidently, had lost themselves. “My brother’s position?” Miss Molyneux enquired.
“It’s thought a very good position,” said the younger sister. “It’s the first position in this part of the county.”
“I dare say you think me very irreverent,” Isabel took occasion to remark. “I suppose you revere your brother and are rather afraid of him.”
“Of course one looks up to one’s brother,” said Miss Molyneux simply.
“If you do that he must be very good—because you, evidently, are beautifully good.”
“He’s most kind. It will never be known, the good he does.”
“His ability is known,” Mildred added; “every one thinks it’s immense.”
“Oh, I can see that,” said Isabel. “But if I were he I should wish to fight to the death: I mean for the heritage of the past. I should hold it tight.”
“I think one ought to be liberal,” Mildred argued gently. “We’ve always been so, even from the earliest times.”
“Ah well,” said Isabel, “you’ve made a great success of it; I don’t wonder you like it. I see you’re very fond of crewels.”
