Chapter 20

CHAPTER XX

Some fortnight after this Madame Merle drove up in a hansom cab
to the house in Winchester Square. As she descended from her
vehicle she observed, suspended between the dining-room windows,
a large, neat, wooden tablet, on whose fresh black ground were
inscribed in white paint the words--"This noble freehold mansion
to be sold"; with the name of the agent to whom application
should be made. "They certainly lose no time," said the visitor
as, after sounding the big brass knocker, she waited to
be admitted; "it's a practical country!" And within the house, as
she ascended to the drawing-room, she perceived numerous signs of
abdication; pictures removed from the walls and placed upon sofas,
windows undraped and floors laid bare. Mrs. Touchett presently
received her and intimated in a few words that condolences might
be taken for granted.

"I know what you're going to say--he was a very good man. But I
know it better than any one, because I gave him more chance to
show it. In that I think I was a good wife." Mrs. Touchett added
that at the end her husband apparently recognised this fact. "He
has treated me most liberally," she said; "I won't say more
liberally than I expected, because I didn't expect. You know that
as a general thing I don't expect. But he chose, I presume, to
recognise the fact that though I lived much abroad and mingled--
you may say freely--in foreign life, I never exhibited the
smallest preference for any one else."

"For any one but yourself," Madame Merle mentally observed; but
the reflexion was perfectly inaudible.

"I never sacrificed my husband to another," Mrs. Touchett
continued with her stout curtness.

"Oh no," thought Madame Merle; "you never did anything for
another!"

There was a certain cynicism in these mute comments which demands
an explanation; the more so as they are not in accord either with
the view--somewhat superficial perhaps--that we have hitherto
enjoyed of Madame Merle's character or with the literal facts of
Mrs. Touchett's history; the more so, too, as Madame Merle had a
well-founded conviction that her friend's last remark was not in
the least to be construed as a side-thrust at herself. The truth
is that the moment she had crossed the threshold she received an
impression that Mr. Touchett's death had had subtle consequences
and that these consequences had been profitable to a little
circle of persons among whom she was not numbered. Of course it
was an event which would naturally have consequences; her
imagination had more than once rested upon this fact during her
stay at Gardencourt. But it had been one thing to foresee such a
matter mentally and another to stand among its massive records.