'I don't insult you; I'm incapable of it. I merely speak of certain facts, and if the allusion's an injury to you the fault's not mine. It's surely a fact that you have kept all this matter quite in your own hands.'
'Are you going back to Lord Warburton?' Isabel asked. 'I'm very tired of his name.'
'You shall hear it again before we've done with it.'
She had spoken of his insulting her, but it suddenly seemed to her that this ceased to be a pain. He was going down—down; the vision of such a fall made her almost giddy: that was the only pain. He was too strange, too different; he didn't touch her. Still, the working of his morbid passion was extraordinary, and she felt a rising curiosity to know in what light he saw himself justified. 'I might say to you that I judge you've nothing to say to me that's worth hearing,' she returned in a moment. 'But I should perhaps be wrong. There's a thing that would be worth my hearing—to know in the plainest words of what it is you accuse me.'
'Of having prevented Pansy's marriage to Warburton. Are those words plain enough?'
'On the contrary, I took a great interest in it. I told you so; and when you told me that you counted on me— that I think was what you said—I accepted the obligation. I was a fool to do so, but I did it.'
'You pretended to do it, and you even pretended reluctance to make me more willing to trust you. Then you began to use your ingenuity to get him out of the way.'
'I think I see what you mean,' said Isabel.
'Where's the letter you told me he had written me?' her husband demanded.
'I haven't the least idea; I haven't asked him.'
'You stopped it on the way,' said Osmond.
Isabel slowly got up; standing there in her white cloak, which covered her to her feet, she might have represented the angel of disdain, first cousin to that of pity. 'Oh, Gilbert, for a man who was so fine—!' she exclaimed in a long murmur.
'I was never so fine as you. You've done everything you wanted. You've got him out of the say without appearing to do so, and you've placed me in the position in which you wished to see me—that of a man who has tried to marry his daughter to a lord, but has grotesquely failed.'
'Pansy doesn't care for him. She's very glad he's gone,' Isabel said.
'That has nothing to do with the matter.'
'And he doesn't care for Pansy.'
'That won't do; you told me he did. I don't know why you wanted this particular satisfaction,' Osmond continued; 'you might have taken some other. It doesn't seem to me that I've been presumptuous—that I have taken too much for granted. I've been very modest about it, very quiet. The idea didn't originate with me. He began to show that he liked her before I ever thought of it. I left it all to you.'
'Yes, you were very glad to leave it to me. After this you must attend to such things yourself.'
He looked at her a moment; then he turned away. 'I thought you were very fond of my daughter.'
'I've never been more so than to-day.'
'Your affection is attended with immense limitations. However, that perhaps is natural.'
'Is this all you wished to say to me?' Isabel asked, taking a candle that stood on one of the tables.
'Are you satisfied? Am I sufficiently disappointed?'
'I don't think that on the whole you're disappointed. You've had another opportunity to try to stupefy me.'
'It's not that. It's proved that Pansy can aim high.'
'Poor little Pansy!' said Isabel as she turned away with her candle.
CHAPTER XLVII
It was from Henrietta Stackpole that she learned how Caspar Goodwood had come to Rome; an event that took place three days after Lord Warburton's departure. This latter fact had been preceded by an incident of some importance to Isabel—the temporary absence, once again, of Madame Merle, who had gone to Naples to stay with a friend, the happy possessor of a villa at Posilippo. Madame Merle had ceased to minister to Isabel's happiness, who found herself wondering whether the most discreet of women might not also by chance be the most dangerous. Sometimes, at night, she had strange visions; she seemed to see her husband and her friend—his friend—in dim, indistinguishable combination. It seemed to her that she had not done with her; this lady had something in reserve. Isabel's imagination applied itself actively to this elusive point, but every now and then it was checked by a nameless dread, so that when the charming woman was away from Rome she had almost a consciousness of respite. She had already learned from Miss Stackpole that Caspar Goodwood was in Europe, Henrietta having written to make it known to her immediately after meeting him in Paris. He himself never wrote to Isabel, and though he was in Europe she thought it very possible he might not desire to see her. Their last interview, before her marriage, had had quite the character of a complete rupture; if she remembered rightly he had said he wished to take his last look at her. Since then he had been the most discordant survival of her earlier time —the only one in fact with which a permanent pain was associated. He had left her that morning with a sense of the most superfluous of shocks: it was like a collision between vessels in broad daylight. There had been no mist, no hidden current to excuse it, and she herself had only wished to steer wide. He had bumped against her prow, however, while her hand was on the tiller, and—to complete the metaphor—had given the lighter vessel a strain which still occasionally betrayed itself in a faint creaking. It had been horrid to see him, because he represented the only serious harm that (to her belief) she had ever done in the world: he was the only person with an unsatisfied claim on her. She had made him unhappy, she couldn't help it; and his unhappiness was a grim reality. She had cried with rage, after he had left her, at—she hardly knew what: she tried to think it had been at his want of consideration. He had come to her with his unhappiness when her own bliss was so perfect; he had done his best to darken the brightness of those pure rays. He had not been violent, and yet there had been a violence in the impression. There had been a violence at any rate in something somewhere; perhaps it was only in her own fit of weeping and in that after-sense of the same which had lasted three or four days.
The effect of his final appeal had in short faded away, and all the first year of her marriage he had dropped out of her books. He was a thankless subject of reference; it was disagreeable to have to think of a person who was sore and sombre about you and whom you could yet do nothing to relieve. It would have been different if she had been able to doubt, even a little, of his unreconciled state, as she doubted of Lord Warburton's; unfortunately it was
