“I like the way you utter that word! No, I’m not conventional: I’m convention itself. You don’t understand that?” And he paused a moment, smiling. “I should like to explain it.” Then with a sudden, quick, bright naturalness, “Do come back again,” he pleaded. “There are so many things we might talk about.”
She stood there with lowered eyes. “What service did you speak of just now?”
“Go and see my little daughter before you leave Florence. She’s alone at the villa; I decided not to send her to my sister, who hasn’t at all my ideas. Tell her she must love her poor father very much,” said Gilbert Osmond gently.
“It will be a great pleasure to me to go,” Isabel answered. “I’ll tell her what you say. Once more good-bye.”
On this he took a rapid, respectful leave. When he had gone she stood a moment looking about her and seated herself slowly and with an air of deliberation. She sat there till her companions came back, with folded hands, gazing at the ugly carpet. Her agitation—for it had not diminished—was very still, very deep. What had happened was something that for a week past her imagination had been going forward to meet; but here, when it came, she stopped—that sublime principle somehow broke down. The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural. Her imagination, as I say, now hung back: there was a last vague space it couldn’t cross—a dusky, uncertain tract which looked ambiguous and even slightly treacherous, like a moorland seen in the winter twilight. But she was to cross it yet.
CHAPTER XXX
She returned on the morrow to Florence, under her cousin’s escort, and Ralph Touchett, though usually restive under railway discipline, thought very well of the successive hours passed in the train that hurried his companion away from the city now distinguished by Gilbert Osmond’s preference—hours that were to form the first stage in a larger scheme of travel. Miss Stackpole had remained behind; she was planning a little trip to Naples, to be carried out with Mr. Bantling’s aid. Isabel was to have three days in Florence before the 4th of June, the date of Mrs. Touchett’s departure, and she determined to devote the last of these to her promise to call on Pansy Osmond. Her plan, however, seemed for a moment likely to modify itself in deference to an idea of Madame Merle’s. This lady was still at Casa Touchett; but she too was on the point of leaving Florence, her next station being an ancient castle in the mountains of Tuscany, the residence of a noble family of that country, whose acquaintance (she had known them, as she said, “forever”) seemed to Isabel, in the light of certain photographs of their immense crenellated dwelling which her friend was able to show her, a precious privilege. She mentioned to this fortunate woman that Mr. Osmond had asked her to take a look at his daughter, but didn’t mention that he had also made her a declaration of love.
“Ah, comme cela se trouve!” Madame Merle exclaimed. “I myself have been thinking it would be a kindness to pay the child a little visit before I go off.”
“We can go together then,” Isabel reasonably said: “reasonably” because the proposal was not uttered in the spirit of enthusiasm. She had prefigured her small pilgrimage as made in solitude; she should like it better so. She was nevertheless prepared to sacrifice this mystic sentiment to her great consideration for her friend.