VOLUME II
49. CHAPTER XLIX
(continued)
Madame Merle slowly got up, stroking her muff, but not removing
her eyes from Isabel's face. "Everything!" she answered.
Isabel sat there looking up at her, without rising; her face was
almost a prayer to be enlightened. But the light of this woman's
eyes seemed only a darkness. "Oh misery!" she murmured at last;
and she fell back, covering her face with her hands. It had come
over her like a high-surging wave that Mrs. Touchett was right.
Madame Merle had married her. Before she uncovered her face again
that lady had left the room.
Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far
away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage
and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old
Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her
happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her
weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet
still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the
silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached
itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed
angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no
one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its
smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her
haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried
her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly
acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion.
But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where
people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved
churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins,
seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty
incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no
gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of
worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles,
could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these
objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual
visitation. Pansy, as we know, was almost always her companion,
and of late the Countess Gemini, balancing a pink parasol, had
lent brilliancy to their equipage; but she still occasionally
found herself alone when it suited her mood and where it suited
the place. On such occasions she had several resorts; the most
accessible of which perhaps was a seat on the low parapet which
edges the wide grassy space before the high, cold front of Saint
John Lateran, whence you look across the Campagna at the
far-trailing outline of the Alban Mount and at that mighty plain,
between, which is still so full of all that has passed from it.
After the departure of her cousin and his companions she roamed
more than usual; she carried her sombre spirit from one familiar
shrine to the other. Even when Pansy and the Countess were with
her she felt the touch of a vanished world. The carriage, leaving
the walls of Rome behind, rolled through narrow lanes where the
wild honeysuckle had begun to tangle itself in the hedges, or
waited for her in quiet places where the fields lay near, while
she strolled further and further over the flower-freckled turf, or
sat on a stone that had once had a use and gazed through the veil
of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene--at
the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of
colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the hills
where the cloud-shadows had the lightness of a blush.
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