Mrs. Osmond Page 14

  Isabel, tired of gazing at the bone-white moon, which by now had succeeded in freeing itself from impalement on that incongruously slender spire, lay down on her bed again, sure she was facing into a night of wakefulness, and almost at once and without noticing it fell asleep, and remained so until a splinter of early sunlight entered at a gap in the curtains and struck at her eyes and made her open them.

  Later, downstairs, she was presented at the reception desk with a small embossed envelope on which her name was inscribed with a curlicued solemnity that she thought of as the very mark, the very seal, of the Parisian gratin. As she opened the flap and extracted the small rectangle of pasteboard she noticed the manager beaming upon her with a pink-faced intensification of respect; the envelope, it seemed, had been carried hither by a liveried footman in a coach with a coat of arms emblazoned on its lacquered door and drawn by a proudly prancing plumed white horse. Isabel smiled, examining the card; it had slipped her mind that she had sent ahead, before leaving Gardencourt, to inform the Princess d’Attrait that in the coming days she might happen to be in the French capital, and enquiring, should she indeed find herself here, if she might call to the Château Vivier and visit her old friend. And now, with typically calculated aplomb, and as a result of that omniscience for which the princess was justly renowned—how in Heaven’s name, Isabel asked herself, had Lorelei known that she had arrived?—here was a printed invitation to a soirée at six of the clock at the château, which was conspicuously hidden in an unexpectedly bosky little place off the rue Saint-Honoré. On the back of the card was scrawled, in a hand that could not have been more dissimilar from the one on the envelope, the jauntily imperious command, Come, or I shall FOR EVER hate you. L.

  XVI

  On the morrow the city wore a summer haze, like a fine muslin hanging, through which high up at the level of tall windows and rooftops of polished slate there showed numerous jewel-like silvery gleams and hot little glints of gold. Isabel, after her morning coffee and croissant, had decided to avail herself of the somewhat marshalled freedom of the Tuileries. She strolled down the long central allée between the two circular ponds, the larger and the smaller, idly noting the manners and costumes of the dallying flâneurs among whom she passed, the fortunate ones who, like her, had time to waste in the middle of a workday morning. She purchased a spray of lily of the valley tightly wrapped in paper from a stall tended by an elderly blind lady in a black lace bonnet. What was the French name for this flower? She could not remember it. She sat down on a bench and watched a band of noisy little boys—why were they not at school?—playing some arcane game that involved much running and hiding among the groves of so many orderly and exquisitely barbered trees. Avid sparrows came and hopped and fluttered about her feet in the dust; she was sorry not to have a crumb to give to them, thinking how they would savour the flakes of pastry she had left on her breakfast plate at the hotel. She listened to the muffled tolling of the bell of the great church of Our Lady on the far side of the river, and thought how the sound seemed, to her fancy, to be of the same old-gold hue as the hazy air out of which the peals came rolling, like a succession of ponderous, reverberant spheres. She lifted the posy of flowers to her face and inhaled deeply their almost fleshly fragrance. She tried again to recall the name of the blossom, it was on the tip of her tongue. Then suddenly she remembered: muguet—that was it. Yes, muguet, which was also the word for the thrush. Ah, yes. She closed her eyes, shrinking inwardly from the approach of the next thought, trying to fend it off, but in vain. And the blackbird? her mind all innocently enquired of her. What was the French appellation for that proud songster? And despite herself her mind promptly and mercilessly replied: why, merle, of course. She let fall the flowers into the dust and rose swiftly to her feet and strode away. Behind her, the cries of the boys at play might have been a cacophony of jeers flung at her retreating back.

  Coming out from the gardens she crossed quickly the place du Carrousel, paying scant heed to the traffic. The shadowy arcades of the Louvre rose before her, seeming, in the veiled air, curiously insubstantial despite their stony massedness, and suddenly she could think of nothing more inviting to her agitated spirit than the prospect of the museum’s cool and echoing galleries. She hurried forward, yearning towards those glades of peace and sequestered solace, narrowly missing, as she went, being run over by a phaeton that came bounding down upon her like a speeding ostrich.

  What she encountered, of course, was the antithesis of the balm of quietude towards which she had so desperately panted. The Parisian tourist season was in what the booking agencies, gleefully rubbing their hands, would have said was “full swing,” and the noble palace of art was fairly a-bulge with crowds and clamour. The spectacle of so many childishly exclaimant people scurrying from one masterpiece to the next gave Isabel the impression of one of those grands lycées of which the French were so self-satisfiedly proud, wherein, on the morning of yet another national insurrection, the pupils had murdered their monitors with happy enthusiasm and now were running riot through the school’s spacious corridors and ornate high halls. She thought of fleeing the place but felt that first she must sit down in coolness, if only for a brief spell, in order to catch her breath and decide what to do with the rest of her morning—for she felt, herself, a little like a student who had been unexpectedly set free from her lessons and urged to go outside and glory in the largeness of the day and partake in Nature’s lightsome and airy beneficence. At length, having negotiated her way through the throng by a series of deft sideways insinuations of her person among its throbbing mass, she at last attained that sanctuary she sought, in a vast cool hushed gallery where, as she had remembered, few visitors ventured, and none tarried, discouraged no less by its mean-windowed gloom than by the series of very tall and very broad canvases which, one could not help suspecting, had been discreetly hidden away here by the museum’s embarrassed curators. For to Isabel’s eye, and according to her husband’s scoffing dismissals, they were, however earnestly executed and sumptuously framed, very bad pictures, by, if she recalled correctly, some of the less promising apprentices of a minor school of Peter Paul Rubens. She found a little brocaded chair cowering in a corner, which besides its appealingly forlorn aspect attracted her by occupying what seemed precisely the spot that would afford a view of the least number of the room’s treasures, with their curiously unimpassioned representations of tumult, dissolution and mass ravishment. The chair was, she surmised, that of the custode, and the fact of this sentinel’s dereliction was an indirect attestation of the value the museum put upon the objects of his watch. Here she sat herself down to bide quietly for a while with nothing more to disturb her other than her own thoughts. Presently, however, her meditations were borne in upon by the sound of approaching male footsteps. So quiet were they and ever so discreet that she might not have registered them at all had not one of the gentleman’s boots had a squeak in the sole. She looked to the doorway and recognised, at once, the exquisitely cut pale-grey suit, the single eyeglass and soft moustache, of Mr. Edward Rosier. They came into each other’s view at the same instant, and Isabel noted with a sort of inward sigh of sad amusement how at sight of her the young man wavered momentarily, as if he had felt upon his face a gust of not entirely fresh or fragrant air. Nevertheless he came on resolutely, or as resolutely as Mr. Rosier ever did anything, and even managed to summon up for the sake of politeness a faint, strained smile. They greeted each other, and he took Isabel’s proffered hand and made over it one of his stiff little Gallic bows.

  “Goodness,” Isabel said, “it seems one cannot put one’s face inside the doors of this delightful place without encountering someone whom one knows.”

  A wrinkle appeared above the eye in the socket of which Mr. Rosier’s single glass was gripped, but already Isabel was regretting her choice of words and the tone in which she had framed them. It had not been her intention to sound anything other than light and friendly, since after all they were, if not old friends,
then certainly of long acquaintance, but she could see the poor man had taken the form of her greeting as at best a piece of heartless raillery and at worst as a calculated rebuff. She rose quickly from her chair, as if by doing so she might mitigate whatever he thought had been her ill-intention, and smiled into his face with as much of apologetic warmth as she could manage.

  “I rarely come here,” Mr. Rosier said, with disdainful coolness. “The crowds—well! But there is a Titian I wish to look at, in which there is a certain combination of lapis-lazuli blue and terracotta that I believe matches exactly a little Venetian piece I am negotiating for.”

  “Ah, I see,” Isabel said, as if she understood exactly the significance of the young man’s quest. “Perhaps I might—perhaps you might permit me to accompany you? I’m very fond of Titian.”

  Mr. Rosier said nothing for a moment, but one corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly, in a way that made Isabel think at once of her husband, and how he would look at her should she so far forget herself as to express the fatuous notion that a person could be “fond” of one of the most transcendently magnificent Old Masters. Ned Rosier, as she saw now, had not failed to learn from his few and far from pleasant encounters with Gilbert Osmond, a master himself in his own line of art, that of deprecation and withering contempt. Indeed, as she studied the young man now, standing before her with his cane and his gloves in one hand and his silk hat in the other, the thought came to her, a thought from which had she been another sort of person she would have squeezed a zestful drop of bitter satisfaction, that in dismissing Edward Rosier’s application for his daughter’s hand in marriage he had passed up the opportunity of bringing into his family—an institution that, Isabel knew now, from the start had hardly included her—a young man who despite appearances of softness and a delicate spirit would likely have become in time a worthy successor to him in his carefully fashioned and punctiliously maintained pose as a contemnor of the world and all but a few, a very few, exceptions to the general mass of mere people who had the effrontery to inhabit it. Yes, she thought, little Ned Rosier might yet draw himself to his full height and take his place beside her husband as one of the lords of condescension.

  He said now that of course she should go along with him to view the great Venetian’s picture, adding smoothly that he would always and in whatever circumstances welcome her company. At this she looked at him sidelong, but his gaze was set straight ahead and his expression betrayed no hint that he was not sincere. She had known Ned Rosier since they were children. Once, in Switzerland, her father had taken himself away on one of his mysterious adventures, and abandoned her and her sisters to the care of a gouvernante who had read too many French novels and under their influence ran off with a person representing himself as a Russian prince. The waifs were rescued by Mr. Rosier senior, an old friend of her father’s, since he happened to be in Neufchâtel with his little boy, who was Isabel’s age, and with whom for some days she felt herself to be solemnly in love. At the time he had been a precious little person, ever careful of his footwear and his linen, and over the intervening years he had not altered by very much, except that he had amassed a great deal of knowledge of Limoges china and Louis Quatorze enamels, of rare books and rare vintages, and a deal of other fine old things besides. He had set his collector’s eye on Pansy Osmond, and in the process of seeking to acquire her had found himself, to his considerable confusion, falling in love with the child. Pansy’s father had spurned him as a candidate for son-in-law, considering the notion preposterous for more reasons than he would bother to ponder, the main one of which, however, was that Lord Warburton himself, on a visit to Rome, had hovered for a time in the vicinity of the sweet little blossom, and might well have made an offer had not Isabel, so her husband believed, conspired against the match and sent the peer on his way. Rosier had persisted, however, swept off his daintily shod feet, for the first time in his life, by the gusts of a genuine passion, and had even gone so far as to auction off his famous collection of bibelots—holding back only his enamels, the forfeiture of which he feared might literally kill him—and having realised fifty thousand dollars on the sale had marched up in triumph to the great carved doors of Palazzo Roccanera and as good as brandished a bundle of banknotes in the face of his beloved’s father, certain this time of being accepted for the formidable fellow he had proved to be, and acknowledged as a fit partner even for a daughter of the great Gilbert Osmond. It was not to be, of course: in Lord Warburton, he of the half-dozen castles and the tens of thousands of acres, Osmond had seen the reflected flash of purple fall upon his daughter and for a moment make her radiant, and even if this time that noble flame had turned out to be a case of feu follet, there would be other opportunities in abundance, for was there not in England a whole House overflowing with lords, and had not his daughter, his poor little slip of a hothouse blossom, proved that she was capable of drawing in her direction the intensest rays of aristocratic attention?

  “You have quit Rome,” Isabel said.

  “I have quit Rome,” Mr. Rosier answered. “There is nothing there for me any longer.”

  Again she fixed on him keenly. She never ceased to marvel at the swift neat way young men such as this one went about the mending of a broken heart. On the occasion of her most recent view of him, after Osmond had finished kicking to pieces the last vestiges of his hopes and calmly stepped back, brushing his hands, she had come close to tears for the piteousness of the poor creature’s plight; yet here he was, hard of eye and firm of step, bent already upon the restoration of his collection of precious objets—his enamels, remember, were intact and safe, and a sound base on which to build—with no thought in his head, as it seemed, for that most precious treasure he had so recently lost.

  “And you,” he asked, “are you on the way from Rome to somewhere else, or returning there?” She told him of her sad pilgrimage to Gardencourt and of her cousin’s death. “I’m sorry to hear of it,” he said, and added vaguely, “I believe I met him, at the Palazzo Roccanera.”

  “You probably did. But, then, when you were at our house you had eyes for one person and one person only.”

  She smiled while he, on the contrary, frowned, and made her no reply. Something had happened, she decided; something had intervened to make him put the past behind him and turn with a set and steady gaze towards the future. It surprised her to find that she wished to know what it could be that had so bucked him up.

  “Do you remember,” she gently enquired, “at that ball in Rome, when you asked my permission to pluck and keep one flower from the little bunch I was minding for Pansy while she was away at the galop?”

  She felt rather than saw his frown deepen.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “They were pansies—I mean, all the flowers in the posy were—”

  “Yes, yes, I know; I remember.”

  There was a note of agitation in his voice—or was it merely impatience? She could not decide.

  “Did you keep it, I wonder, the blossom?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, he propelled himself forward suddenly and strode ahead of her, like a racehorse making its final dash towards the winning-post, so that she had to lift the hem of her gown and skip along hurriedly to keep up. It was not a display of rudeness on his part, she knew; she regretted having posed the question, in fact regretted having mentioned the matter at all; perhaps, indeed, it had been nothing less than coarse of her to do so.

  They came at last to the picture that was the object of Mr. Rosier’s quest. It was a portrait of a young man seated, or perhaps standing loosely, with his left arm supported on a pillar, and looking off somewhat tentatively to the side. He wore a grey glove and held its fellow in the same hand. Under a jet-black jerkin there was amply visible a glowing white shirt with small frills at the throat and wrists. His black hair, as black as his coat, was cut low in a straight line across his forehead, and his upper lip was adorned with what might be termed an undecided moustache. He remin
ded Isabel of no one so much as Mr. Rosier himself; it was not that the two young men, one on the canvas before her and the other standing by her side, resembled each other in any strong manner; but there was something in the way the painter’s subject held himself, at a slight angle to the perpendicular, in a pose pensive yet tense, that was her companion to the life. She remarked the touch of melancholy in his look, and Rosier lifted his nose a fraction of an inch and sniffed. He was leaning forward from the waist with his face almost pressed up against the pigment.

  “All his men are sad-eyed,” he said, quietly and vaguely, as if he were alone and communing with himself. “Even his kings and his generals, all seem to be looking in sorrow towards something distant and terrible.”

  He was still bent upon the painting, his eyeglass held a little away from his eye, in that attitude of uncanny stillness she knew so well—how often had she seen her husband stand rapt like this before a coveted masterpiece?—examining intently the small locket that hung about the young man’s neck on a string of amber beads. The locket was made of some stone the colour of sealing wax, with a single pearl pendent from it and a small square blue stone set at its centre. Mr. Rosier sighed contentedly and stepped back from the canvas, screwing the eyeglass tight again into its socket.

  “Yes,” he murmured, “yes, that’s it.”

  “What?” Isabel exclaimed. “You mean this is a picture of the thing you are negotiating the purchase of, the very thing itself?”