Mrs. Osmond Read online

  A half-hour later she found Henrietta in the parlour, standing at the bay window with her back to the room. She did not turn at the sound of Isabel’s step, although Isabel was sure she had heard it. From the stiffness of her stance it was plain that she was cross, and more than cross.

  “I’m told you are to leave straight away,” she said, without turning.

  “Yes,” Isabel murmured. “I sent Staines to make the bookings. Has she returned yet, do you know?”

  “Hardly—Thomas Cook’s is not so near as that.”

  “Of course, of course.” The silence stretched itself between them, like a fine elastic cord. “Won’t you at least look at me?” Isabel pleaded. “I feel very badly, to spurn your hospitality in this way.”

  “Oh, a fig for my hospitality!” Henrietta said, and turned about with such rapidity she might have spun on a pivot. “It’s not my hospitality you should feel badly for, but something and someone else entirely.”

  “Yes, I know,” Isabel responded meekly, and bowed her head. Then she gave herself a sort of hopeless shake. “You don’t understand, Henrietta,” she softly wailed. “I cannot face him—I cannot!”

  “Cannot, or dare not?” her friend unrelentingly returned.

  “Oh, what is the difference!”

  “You’re running away, like a frightened rabbit,” Henrietta pronounced, with a narrow glare. “I should have expected better of you, Isabel Archer.”

  “Ah, you call me by my old name,” Isabel said, with an attempt at a mollifying smile.

  “It’s your true and only name, in my mind,” Henrietta said implacably. “Since you will not rid yourself of the dreadful man who took it from you in the first place, I reserve the right to restore it to you, if only for my own satisfaction.”

  Isabel, fatigued suddenly although she was not long risen from rest, went and sat down on the unwelcoming sofa, and folded her hands in her lap. Henrietta remained standing with her back to the window, fixed upon her despairingly. “Mr. Goodwood is due at eleven; it is now”—she consulted her watch—“very nearly nine-thirty, and your maid has not returned. Shall I telegraph, and see if I can put him off? He is at a hotel in Piccadilly.”

  Isabel shook her head. “If necessary I shall go and wait in some square, until it’s time for the train. The day is sunny, I should welcome the open air for a while.”

  Henrietta sighed exasperatedly. In the old days she had found it hard to remain vexed at her friend for any extended time, and it was no different now. “Come and take one of these armchairs,” she said, “that sofa is impossible—even Robert refuses to sit on it.”

  “Oh, Mr. Bantling!” Isabel exclaimed vaguely. “I had quite forgot about him. Have you spoken to him this morning? Did he do well at his card game?”

  This enquiry Henrietta set aside as unworthy of reply. “It would be distressing for all concerned,” she said, “were we to encounter Mr. Goodwood just as you’re in the act of taking to your heels.”

  “Oh, Henrietta!” Isabel murmured, shaking her head. “I see I have made you very angry. I’m sorry.” She looked again to the window where her friend stood, and to the light of the summer morning sparkling on the glass. “I really should like to go outside. Is there a grassy spot with a bench? In London one is never far from a park, I certainly remember that. We can leave a note for Staines, to tell her where I am.”

  Henrietta delivered herself of a distinctly unladylike snort. “I must say I am surprised at you, wanting to run and hide like this. It’s not the behaviour of the person I thought I knew in former days.”

  “I’m afraid that person is no more,” Isabel sadly responded. “She finally expired some weeks ago, in Rome, at the end of what might be said to have been a wasting illness—I have that much in common with my cousin.”

  Henrietta, forgetting her anger for the moment, looked at her friend in frank dismay. “You shock me, Isabel, but you worry me more. I knew your life had taken a turn for the worse—”

  “That’s what they say of the mortally ill,” Isabel interposed, with a smile expressive of gallows gaiety.

  “—but I did not realise,” Henrietta pressed on, content to sustain the morbid note, “the gravity of your condition. I think you’re right: that man you insisted on marrying had near killed you. Mark, I say near: you are not beyond saving, not by a long way, my girl, if I, and others of a like mind to me, have anything to do with it!”

  On the strength of this stoutly affirming pledge the two friends left the room together, in an unaccountably lightened mood, and descended to the hall. There Isabel pressed a sovereign into the damp palm of the sleepy maid and instructed her to tell Staines to summon a hansom and come with the luggage and look for her at— She turned questioningly to Henrietta, who named Cavendish Square as being but a short walk away. Then the ladies donned their straw hats and, equipped with a pair of lace parasols, sallied forth into the morning.

  The day was not quite as fresh as it had seemed when it was shining in at the panes of Henrietta’s bay window. There was dust in the air, and a dull brown smell of carriage horses, and the sunlight had a dingy cast, so that Isabel was surprised to find in herself a sudden longing for the pellucid air of Italy. Perhaps that country, the glory of the south, was more of home to her than she had realised. The possibility struck at her with an edge of cold steel. She had conceived of her return to Rome as a matter of grim duty; it would be nothing less than a scandal if she were to get something out of it, something for herself, even if it were to be no more than the sense of a sweet homecoming. The matters she would have to attend to there would leave her bruised and bleeding, or, to figure it less heroically, would smear her with slime from top to toe. She would rather not to have to go back, much rather; at first she had thought of fleeing Europe altogether and returning to her native shores, and might have gone, indeed almost certainly would have gone, save that the final remark Madame Merle had made to her at their last meeting was that she herself would “go to America,” a thing that for Isabel would have been tantamount to the sowing of that great good land with salt. Besides, it was not in her nature to shirk her duty and shrink from the things that must be dealt with. Always it had been a prominent part of her idea of herself that in life one may preserve the shreds of honour only by facing up squarely to one’s misdeeds and gross misprisions—facing up to them was the only way of facing them down. But of the sins that had been committed in the unhappy and less than Edenic fields to which she had lately been forced to say farewell, even such a passionate penitent as she was could make out no sins of her own that were more than venial, compared at least to the enormities committed by others. She had examined her conscience thoroughly in this matter and, wont as she was to blame herself before others, she failed to see how she could be held the first accountable for the fall into those retributive flames in which she, and Madame Merle, and even Madame Merle’s daughter—that precious and misfortunate innocent!—were now being consumed. Yes, she had given in to pride, that pride indeed which cometh before the fall; yes, she had wilfully ignored the counsels of those who loved and revered her; yes, she had married Gilbert Osmond out of—was it mere stubbornness? Yes, yes, yes, she had done these things, but surely she could say, and not for any effort at self-exoneration, that worse, far worse, had been done to her.

  XII

  Cavendish Square Gardens proved to be, in the endearingly eccentric way that London has of arranging these things, perfectly circular. There had been a long drought, and the grass was crisp underfoot, and the trees looked decidedly dejected, their foliage being more grey than green. The densely moted air occluded the morning sun’s vigorous rays, and the traffic grinding its way around the square, like a malfunctioning carousel, seemed unnaturally clamorous. Isabel and her friend found a shaded bench and arranged themselves upon it as comfortably as the hard slats beneath and behind them would allow. Already their footwear was uniformly hazed over with a fine film of beige dust. Isabel remarked idly on the daintiness of the
parasols they had carried out with them—one was pink, the other a translucent shade of baby-blue—and Henrietta was quick to observe that they had been left behind by successive and now forgotten summer visitors, for surely no one would imagine for a moment that she would have stooped to the purchasing of anything so frivolously feminine. Isabel suppressed a smile; she was always struck by the number and variety of social solecisms her dear friend was afraid the world would suspect her capable of. She had never forgotten, although she dearly wished she could, the occasion at table during an overnight stay at the abode of Lord Warburton and his sisters—Lord W. was one of the not very numerous Englishmen of whom it could be said with perfect accuracy that his home was indeed his castle—she had noted how, as each new course was laid before her, Henrietta would hesitate and cast a sharp but covert glance about her to see which implement the other diners should choose from the gleaming array laid out to right and left of their plates, before daring to pick up knife or fork or spoon herself.

  “I am sorry, you know,” Isabel said now, with friendly emphasis, “to be compelled to leave you so soon and so abruptly.”

  “ ‘Compelled’?” Henrietta responded sonorously, her sarcasm mitigated by a smile. “I say again, you seem deplorably changed from the person I knew you to be hitherto. That person would have bowed to no one’s, and certainly no man’s, compulsion.”

  “And I say again,” Isabel, also smiling, insisted, “that the person you speak of, that version of me, is no more.”

  “Pshaw!” Henrietta vulgarly exclaimed; it was one of her most favoured expletives. “That ‘version’ of you, as you call it, is cravenly in hiding, and nothing more.”

  “Well, if so, I wonder whom it could be that I am in hiding from.”

  Henrietta turned upon her another of those looks Mr. Bantling would admiringly characterise as “large.” “Why, from yourself!” she pronounced. “Whom else, in the world, are you so frightened of? Oh, I know you, Isabel Archer. The most monstrous ghouls might parade before you, clanking their chains and keening, and not a hair on your head will turn, but set you square in front of a looking-glass and you will start back from your own image with piercing cries of fright.”

  “But is that not true of all of us?” Isabel proposed, after a moment’s cogitation. “Nothing is as uncanny as the look of one’s own eyes peering out of a glass.”

  “That’s only so for those who spend overly much time reflecting on their own reflections.”

  “You are unkind, dear Henrietta, to harp so on my vanity!” Isabel said with a light laugh. “It is only one, after all, among my many besetting sins.”

  “It’s not your vanity I am thinking of,” her friend complacently returned, “although you are vain, I grant you.”

  Despite the mildness with which these words were uttered, they struck a sharp note.

  “What is it then you are thinking of?” Isabel demanded, with equal measures of impatience, humour and misgiving.

  For a long moment Henrietta said no word, only sat very straight on the bench and gazed at her friend with tightened lips and a kind of grimly speculating air. Then abruptly she clapped her palms on her knees and stood up. “Come, let us make a circuit in the sun—you’ll be trapped for long enough in railway carriages, smothered amid smoke and cinders.”

  The sunshine had intensified even in the short interval while they were seated, although its fieriness was somewhat tempered by an intrepid little breeze that was making a muttering in the leaves of the tall trees above them. As they set off along the perimeter path Henrietta linked her arm in Isabel’s in a token of easy friendliness. Isabel turned her head to cast a glance behind her; she was wondering how long it would be before Staines would come for her with the carriage. Since the decision to leave had been forced on her, by the prospect of Caspar Goodwood’s imminent appearance, she was anxious to be on her way.

  “You must find me a frightful scold,” Henrietta said, without, however, the slightest note of apology or remorse. “But I hope you know how I care about you and worry for your welfare.” She allowed a brief pause, then pressed Isabel’s arm more tightly to her side. “I wish, my dear, you would tell me what happened in Rome. I know it was bad, and I cannot bear for you to go off and leave me to speculate. I shall imagine the most monstrous things.”

  Isabel smiled a little to herself; she doubted so fine and decent an imaginative faculty as her friend possessed would be capable of generating a concept of wickednesses commensurate with those that had been visited upon her in Rome.

  “Well, then, if only to spare you sleepless nights of wasted speculation, I shall tell you all—or as much as I know, for such is the web of deceit in which I’m caught up I cannot be sure there are not more predators readying themselves to spring out at me.”

  “Heavens,” Henrietta breathed. “Is it really so heinous?”

  A black-clad nurse passed them by on the dusty pathway, pushing before her a perambulator as shiny and glidingly buoyant as a truncated gondola, from the white satin depths of which a somewhat mottled tiny pink face peered out, with that expression of dazed astonishment, eyes wide and soft lips formed into a tiny round, with which babies regard the brightly lit and unaccountably populous place they have so recently arrived in. Catching Isabel’s glance, the creature lifted higher still its invisible brows and drew in its extensible neck in what seemed a deepened access of alarm. Isabel thought of her own child, who had been so frail and had died so soon he could hardly be said to have been fully born at all. Gilberto, the creature was called, a pallid speck of failing life that had flickered out after a mere six months upon this earth. Sometimes, especially in her increasingly sleepless nights, she tormented herself with the thought that the child might have lived if she had loved him more.

  “Do you remember,” she asked, “my husband’s sister Amy, the Countess Gemini?”

  Henrietta delivered herself of another of those snorts of hers that were rarely noticed “at home” but that had temporarily silenced many a dinner table on this side of the great dividing ocean. “I should think I do!” she said animatedly. “Who could forget such a person?” She stopped and stared. “Don’t say it is she who has gotten her talons into you?”

  “No no,” Isabel answered. “In fact she did me a service, though whether it was intended to be in my best interest or not I cannot say.” They walked on. Isabel had begun to suffer from the dusty heat, but she did not wish to sit down again, finding the slow, deliberate pace conducive to the baring of her heart, to the shedding of her secrets. “She told me something, my sister-in-law, something I had not known, that had been kept hidden from me for—oh, for years.”

  She was silent for some paces, made speechless by the thought of the scale of the thing.

  “Kept from you by whom?” Henrietta enquired, with a gentleness expressive of the keenness of the sympathy she felt for her suffering friend. It might be supposed that a person of Miss Stackpole’s profession, an assiduous observer of the world’s ways, the crooked as well as the straight, and a colourful reporter on them to her distant and numerous readers, would have been avid that there should be disclosed to her in all their awful detail the hidden horrors of a society into which this dearest of her friends had allowed herself to be lured for the capture. Henrietta, however, awaited Isabel’s confession with nothing but the deepest dread, and wished only that what she was about to hear might prove laughably innocuous, the account of a few trifling troubles grossly inflated by a mind fantastically at odds with itself. But the look of Isabel’s drawn features, which were of a shade of grey against the bounding green of summer, told her unmistakably what she was “in for.”

  “It was a thing,” Isabel said, in a low, urgent voice, with her gaze fixed fiercely on the path before her, “that the countess had known of for years—that she had known of from the start, but had been too afraid to tell me, until the time came when even she could no longer countenance my being left in the dark.”

  “Afraid—?�
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  “Of her brother, my husband, of course; of him, and of Serena Merle.”

  Henrietta frowned. Madame Merle’s was not a name she had expected to hear mentioned in the tale that at last was beginning to be unfolded before her, but now, when she did hear it, she was surprised to find herself unsurprised. She had seen little of this lady, and knew less, but what she had seen, and what she did know, left her in no doubt as to what such a person would be capable of, and the lengths she would go to in achieving her ends. And despite the warmth of the sun on her back, the staunch young woman felt a chill shiver along her spine.

  They had progressed sufficiently far around the circle of greenery for them now to encounter once more the dark-suited nurse and her tiny charge. This time Isabel carefully avoided looking at the startled pink face framed in satin within the hood, and passed on quickly. When she began to speak again the words tumbled out of her in a sullen, low monotone.

  “Amy told me many things, of which the most remarkable, to say the least, was that my husband’s first wife had no child. Yes, yes, there is Pansy, I know, and she is Osmond’s daughter. Until the time when she was born he was living in Naples, although he and his wife were elsewhere—in Piedmont, if I have it right—when the poor woman supposedly died in childbirth. He was fortunate in the way the dates fell out—he was always fortunate in such things, I see that now; the luck of the devil, you may say.” She gave a brief laugh, which sounded, however, more like a harsh sigh. “He returned from Piedmont, and thereafter left Naples, a widower with a little daughter, and settled in Florence, in rented apartments on the hill of Bellosguardo. As to where Madame Merle made off to, I do not know.”