скачать книгу бесплатно
“He’s in wretched health; he’s quite unfit for work,” Isabel urged.
“Pshaw! don’t you believe it. I work when I’m sick,” cried her friend. Later, when she stepped into the boat on joining the water-party, she remarked to Ralph that she supposed he hated her and would like to drown her.
“Ah no,” said Ralph, “I keep my victims for a slower torture. And you’d be such an interesting one!”
“Well, you do torture me; I may say that. But I shock all your prejudices; that’s one comfort.”
“My prejudices? I haven’t a prejudice to bless myself with. There’s intellectual poverty for you.”
“The more shame to you; I’ve some delicious ones. Of course I spoil your flirtation, or whatever it is you call it, with your cousin; but I don’t care for that, as I render her the service of drawing you out. She’ll see how thin you are.”
“Ah, do draw me out!” Ralph exclaimed. “So few people will take the trouble.”
Miss Stackpole, in this undertaking, appeared to shrink from no effort; resorting largely, whenever the opportunity offered, to the natural expedient of interrogation. On the following day the weather was bad, and in the afternoon the young man, by way of providing indoor amusement, offered to show her the pictures. Henrietta strolled through the long gallery in his society, while he pointed out its principal ornaments and mentioned the painters and subjects. Miss Stackpole looked at the pictures in perfect silence, committing herself to no opinion, and Ralph was gratified by the fact that she delivered herself of none of the little ready-made ejaculations of delight of which the visitors to Gardencourt were so frequently lavish. This young lady indeed, to do her justice, was but little addicted to the use of conventional terms; there was something earnest and inventive in her tone, which at times, in its strained deliberation, suggested a person of high culture speaking a foreign language. Ralph Touchett subsequently learned that she had at one time officiated as art critic to a journal of the other world; but she appeared, in spite of this fact, to carry in her pocket none of the small change of admiration. Suddenly, just after he had called her attention to a charming Constable, she turned and looked at him as if he himself had been a picture.
“Do you always spend your time like this?” she demanded.
“I seldom spend it so agreeably.”
“Well, you know what I mean—without any regular occupation.”
“Ah,” said Ralph, “I’m the idlest man living.”
Miss Stackpole directed her gaze to the Constable again, and Ralph bespoke her attention for a small Lancret hanging near it, which represented a gentleman in a pink doublet and hose and a ruff, leaning against the pedestal of the statue of a nymph in a garden and playing the guitar to two ladies seated on the grass. “That’s my ideal of a regular occupation,” he said.
Miss Stackpole turned to him again, and, though her eyes had rested upon the picture, he saw she had missed the subject. She was thinking of something much more serious. “I don’t see how you can reconcile it to your conscience.”
“My dear lady, I have no conscience!”
“Well, I advise you to cultivate one. You’ll need it the next time you go to America.”
“I shall probably never go again.”
“Are you ashamed to show yourself?”
Ralph meditated with a mild smile. “I suppose that if one has no conscience one has no shame.”
“Well, you’ve got plenty of assurance,” Henrietta declared. “Do you consider it right to give up your country?”
“Ah, one doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives UP one’s grandmother. They’re both antecedent to choice—elements of one’s composition that are not to be eliminated.”
“I suppose that means that you’ve tried and been worsted. What do they think of you over here?”
“They delight in me.”
“That’s because you truckle to them.”
“Ah, set it down a little to my natural charm!” Ralph sighed.
“I don’t know anything about your natural charm. If you’ve got any charm it’s quite unnatural. It’s wholly acquired—or at least you’ve tried hard to acquire it, living over here. I don’t say you’ve succeeded. It’s a charm that I don’t appreciate, anyway. Make yourself useful in some way, and then we’ll talk about it.”
“Well, now, tell me what I shall do,” said Ralph.
“Go right home, to begin with.”
“Yes, I see. And then?”
“Take right hold of something.”
“Well, now, what sort of thing?”
“Anything you please, so long as you take hold. Some new idea, some big work.”
“Is it very difficult to take hold?” Ralph enquired.
“Not if you put your heart into it.”
“Ah, my heart,” said Ralph. “If it depends upon my heart—!”
“Haven’t you got a heart?”
“I had one a few days ago, but I’ve lost it since.”
“You’re not serious,” Miss Stackpole remarked; “that’s what’s the matter with you.” But for all this, in a day or two, she again permitted him to fix her attention and on the later occasion assigned a different cause to her mysterious perversity. “I know what’s the matter with you, Mr. Touchett,” she said. “You think you’re too good to get married.”
“I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole,” Ralph answered; “and then I suddenly changed my mind.”
“Oh pshaw!” Henrietta groaned.
“Then it seemed to me,” said Ralph, “that I was not good enough.”
“It would improve you. Besides, it’s your duty.”
“Ah,” cried the young man, “one has so many duties! Is that a duty too?”
“Of course it is—did you never know that before? It’s every one’s duty to get married.”
Ralph meditated a moment; he was disappointed. There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming woman she was at least a very good “sort”. She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave: she went into cages, she flourished lashes, like a spangled lion-tamer. He had not supposed her to be capable of vulgar arts, but these last words struck him as a false note. When a marriageable young woman urges matrimony on an unencumbered young man the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the altruistic impulse.
“Ah, well now, there’s a good deal to be said about that,” Ralph rejoined.
“There may be, but that’s the principal thing. I must say I think it looks very exclusive, going round all alone, as if you thought no woman was good enough for you. Do you think you’re better than any one else in the world? In America it’s usual for people to marry.”
“If it’s my duty,” Ralph asked, “is it not, by analogy, yours as well?”
Miss Stackpole’s ocular surfaces unwinkingly caught the sun. “Have you the fond hope of finding a flaw in my reasoning? Of course I’ve as good a right to marry as any one else.”
“Well then,” said Ralph, “I won’t say it vexes me to see you single. It delights me rather.”
“You’re not serious yet. You never will be.”
“Shall you not believe me to be so on the day I tell you I desire to give up the practice of going round alone?”
Miss Stackpole looked at him for a moment in a manner which seemed to announce a reply that might technically be called encouraging. But to his great surprise this expression suddenly resolved itself into an appearance of alarm and even of resentment. “No, not even then,” she answered dryly. After which she walked away.
“I’ve not conceived a passion for your friend,” Ralph said that evening to Isabel, “though we talked some time this morning about it.”
“And you said something she didn’t like,” the girl replied.
Ralph stared. “Has she complained of me?”
“She told me she thinks there’s something very low in the tone of Europeans towards women.”
“Does she call me a European?”
“One of the worst. She told me you had said to her something that an American never would have said. But she didn’t repeat it.”
Ralph treated himself to a luxury of laughter. “She’s an extraordinary combination. Did she think I was making love to her?”
“No; I believe even Americans do that. But she apparently thought you mistook the intention of something she had said, and put an unkind construction on it.”
“I thought she was proposing marriage to me and I accepted her. Was that unkind?”
Isabel smiled. “It was unkind to me. I don’t want you to marry.”
“My dear cousin, what’s one to do among you all?” Ralph demanded. “Miss Stackpole tells me it’s my bounden duty, and that it’s hers, in general, to see I do mine!”
“She has a great sense of duty,” said Isabel gravely. “She has indeed, and it’s the motive of everything she says. That’s what I like her for. She thinks it’s unworthy of you to keep so many things to yourself. That’s what she wanted to express. If you thought she was trying to—to attract you, you were very wrong.”
“It’s true it was an odd way, but I did think she was trying to attract me. Forgive my depravity.”
“You’re very conceited. She had no interested views, and never supposed you would think she had.”
“One must be very modest then to talk with such women,” Ralph said humbly. “But it’s a very strange type. She’s too personal—considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in without knocking at the door.”
“Yes,” Isabel admitted, “she doesn’t sufficiently recognise the existence of knockers; and indeed I’m not sure that she doesn’t think them rather a pretentious ornament. She thinks one’s door should stand ajar. But I persist in liking her.”
“I persist in thinking her too familiar,” Ralph rejoined, naturally somewhat uncomfortable under the sense of having been doubly deceived in Miss Stackpole.
“Well,” said Isabel, smiling, “I’m afraid it’s because she’s rather vulgar that I like her.”
“She would be flattered by your reason!”
“If I should tell her I wouldn’t express it in that way. I should say it’s because there’s something of the ‘people’ in her.”
“What do you know about the people? and what does she, for that matter?”
“She knows a great deal, and I know enough to feel that she’s a kind of emanation of the great democracy—of the continent, the country, the nation. I don’t say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she vividly figures it.”
“You like her then for patriotic reasons. I’m afraid it is on those very grounds I object to her.”
“Ah,” said Isabel with a kind of joyous sigh, “I like so many things! If a thing strikes me with a certain intensity I accept it. I don’t want to swagger, but I suppose I’m rather versatile. I like people to be totally different from Henrietta—in the style of Lord Warburton’s sisters for instance. So long as I look at the Misses Molyneux they seem to me to answer a kind of ideal. Then Henrietta presents herself, and I’m straightway convinced by her; not so much in respect to herself as in respect to what masses behind her.”
“Ah, you mean the back view of her,” Ralph suggested.
“What she says is true,” his cousin answered; “you’ll never be serious. I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading till it stops at the green Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta—pardon my simile—has something of that odour in her garments.”
Isabel blushed a little as she concluded this speech, and the blush, together with the momentary ardour she had thrown into it, was so becoming to her that Ralph stood smiling at her for a moment after she had ceased speaking. “I’m not sure the Pacific’s so green as that,” he said; “but you’re a young woman of imagination. Henrietta, however, does smell of the Future—it almost knocks one down!”
CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_0dabfd2f-8a27-5d9b-9f4d-f80b318124c9)
He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words even when Miss Stackpole appeared to strike the personal note most strongly. He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogeneous organisms, and that he, for his own part, was too perverted a representative of the nature of man to have a right to deal with her in strict reciprocity. He carried out his resolve with a great deal of tact, and the young lady found in renewed contact with him no obstacle to the exercise of her genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her confidence. Her situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel and full of appreciation herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her sense, rendered Isabel’s character a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose noble tone, as she said, met with her full approval—her situation at Gardencourt would have been perfectly comfortable had she not conceived an irresistible mistrust of the little lady for whom she had at first supposed herself obliged to “allow” as mistress of the house. She presently discovered, in truth, that this obligation was of the lightest and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved. Mrs. Touchett had defined her to Isabel as both an adventuress and a bore—adventuresses usually giving one more of a thrill; she had expressed some surprise at her niece’s having selected such a friend, yet had immediately added that she knew Isabel’s friends were her own affair and that she had never undertaken to like them all or to restrict the girl to those she liked.
“If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you’d have a very small society,” Mrs. Touchett frankly admitted; “and I don’t think I like any man or woman well enough to recommend them to you. When it comes to recommending it’s a serious affair. I don’t like Miss Stackpole—everything about her displeases me; she talks so much too loud and looks at one as if one wanted to look at her—which one doesn’t. I’m sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-house, and I detest the manners and the liberties of such places. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners, which you doubtless think very bad, I’ll tell you that I prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole knows I detest boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it the highest in the world. She’d like Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house. For me, I find it almost too much of one! We shall never get on together therefore, and there’s no use trying.”
Mrs. Touchett was right in guessing that Henrietta disapproved of her, but she had not quite put her finger on the reason. A day or two after Miss Stackpole’s arrival she had made some invidious reflexions on American hotels, which excited a vein of counter-argument on the part of the correspondent of the Interviewer, who in the exercise of her profession had acquainted herself, in the western world, with every form of caravansary. Henrietta expressed the opinion that American hotels were the best in the world, and Mrs. Touchett, fresh from a renewed struggle with them, recorded a conviction that they were the worst. Ralph, with his experimental geniality, suggested, by way of healing the breach, that the truth lay between the two extremes and that the establishments in question ought to be described as fair middling. This contribution to the discussion, however, Miss Stackpole rejected with scorn. Middling indeed! If they were not the best in the world they were the worst, but there was nothing middling about an American hotel.
“We judge from different points of view, evidently,” said Mrs. Touchett. “I like to be treated as an individual; you like to be treated as a ‘party’.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Henrietta replied. “I like to be treated as an American lady.”
“Poor American ladies!” cried Mrs. Touchett with a laugh. “They’re the slaves of slaves.”
“They’re the companions of freemen,” Henrietta retorted.
“They’re the companions of their servants—the Irish chambermaid and the negro waiter. They share their work.”
“Do you call the domestics in an American household ‘slaves’?” Miss Stackpole enquired. “If that’s the way you desire to treat them, no wonder you don’t like America.”
“If you’ve not good servants you’re miserable,” Mrs. Touchett serenely said. “They’re very bad in America, but I’ve five perfect ones in Florence.”
“I don’t see what you want with five,” Henrietta couldn’t help observing. “I don’t think I should like to see five persons surrounding me in that menial position.”
“I like them in that position better than in some others,” proclaimed Mrs. Touchett with much meaning.
“Should you like me better if I were your butler, dear?” her husband asked.
“I don’t think I should: you wouldn’t at all have the tenue.”
“The companions of freemen—I like that, Miss Stackpole,” said Ralph. “It’s a beautiful description.”
“When I said freemen I didn’t mean you, sir!”
And this was the only reward that Ralph got for his compliment. Miss Stackpole was baffled; she evidently thought there was something treasonable in Mrs. Touchett’s appreciation of a class which she privately judged to be a mysterious survival of feudalism. It was perhaps because her mind was oppressed with this image that she suffered some days to elapse before she took occasion to say to Isabel: “My dear friend, I wonder if you’re growing faithless.”
“Faithless? Faithless to you, Henrietta?”
“No, that would be a great pain; but it’s not that.”
