Mrs. Osmond Read online

  Mr. Rosier’s cheek turned pink, and he bit his lip to stop a smile; but his embarras, as she realised at once, was not for anything he had said or done himself, but for her naïveté and want of knowledge of the world of rare things.

  “No, no,” he said, stammering a little, “only the colours, the tints, are the same. That is a sapphire, you see, and as for the red stone, well, it might be anything, for I cannot identify it.”

  Isabel could only nod, and follow dutifully with her eyes where his finger pointed; he might have been a lecturer tapping with his ferrule upon a chalkboard, illustrating all the points of her ignorance. Of course, the ornament in the picture was only a painted bauble, which the artist would keep in a drawer among a jumble of other “props” with which to bedeck a sitter in need of a touch of jewelled interest, of vivid colour. No doubt, she thought, half in sadness and half in amusement, Mr. Rosier must consider her hopelessly provincial, despite the position she held as a grande signora in an ancient palace at the heart of the capital of Christendom. They were both Americans, but from childhood he had lived among the splendours of old Europe, while she was still pent in Albany, like a clay pigeon in its sprung cage, awaiting the moment when she should be released to soar gloriously high into the highest blue. And she had soared, until she heard the booming of the guns. That the two people who had brought her low were Americans did not lead her to look more forgivingly upon Europe; indeed, in those moments, surprisingly rare, when she could not but give in to raging indignation, it seemed to her that the continent had lured that pair separately to its shores and purposely corrupted them and joined them together and laid them down, like poisoned bait, in the certain knowledge that one day she would chance upon them.

  She let her gaze rest once more on the painting of the anxious-eyed youth in his black coat. Perhaps Osmond himself had been like this once, tentative, irresolute, a little fearful, even. Had she not, in the early days of their marriage, glimpsed a vulnerability in him he tried so hard to hide, an almost boyish defencelessness before a world that he dared to show, that he gloried in showing, how deeply he despised it? There must have been, when he was young, moments of doubt? Yes, even Gilbert Osmond must at times have had his tremors in the dark. It could not have been at all easy for a young man from Baltimore with nothing to his name save a modest allowance from his family, some learning, and a great belief in his own superiority in taste, spirit and intellect, to storm single-handedly the citadel of European society, to storm it, and breach its walls, and ride triumphant into its central square, and then deliver the conqueror’s coup de grâce by seeming to retreat from the tiresome fripperies of public life and immure himself in his own citadel, the fortress of his self-regard.

  Yes, he had done much, he had achieved much, but she was wrong, Isabel realised, to think that he had done it single-handedly. Had not Serena Merle been by his side, and more than by his side—oh, much more!—to stiffen his sword arm and hold up the hem of his cloak? Isabel could not conceive of two people more unalike than Madame Merle and little Ned Rosier. Nevertheless when just now the young man had let slip his little smile at her faux-pas, there had risen before her on the spot, not only the memory of her husband’s deprecating smirk, but also that of Madame Merle’s own smile, bland, slow, insinuative, that drew up her lips at the left side, like the corner of a curtain being lifted on something that had better not be seen— But here Isabel stopped herself, and laid a restraining hand, as it were, on her more vengeful impulses, impulses which, as she had ruefully to acknowledge, she had not known herself capable of until these recent weeks. In the particular hell to which they were condemned, herself, her husband and Madame Merle, no one escaped the flames, except perhaps her husband, for it was ice that he was being burned by, although the numbness that had set in so long ago prevented him from knowing himself to be already seared to the bone.

  Now the two accidental companions turned aside from Titian’s immortal young man and walked back along the way they had come. Soon they were plunged once more in the midst of the pullulating throng. There was the question of locating a site of egress, but beyond that there was the trickier problem of finding a mode by which they might, in the politest and most civilised manner, separate and go their ways. Isabel had the notion that Mr. Rosier would happily have parted from her some time ago, and she did mean to release him very soon; however, there was something she needed to settle between them, if for no other than the selfish reason of putting her mind at rest, although she was not certain this was not an elevated way of saying that she wished to satisfy her curiosity. She was thinking of the sudden acceleration of pace that Mr. Rosier had put on, pulling ahead of her as surgingly as any thoroughbred in the last length at Longchamps, when she had made so bold—perhaps far too bold—as to remind him of the flower he had plucked from Pansy’s bouquet that night of the party at Gloriani’s house in Rome. Now she had to marshal all her courage, or, if you like, to summon up all her shamelessness—of which, it pleased her to think, she had had much less heretofore than lately she had acquired—in order to be far more forward than so far she had dared. It was in her mind to tell him, to risk telling him, how well aware she was that any help she had afforded him in his siege of Palazzo Roccanera and his fruitless attempt to rescue the damsel sequestered within its forbiddingly massive walls had been wholly of a negative nature—she had confined herself to doing nothing to hinder him or damage his case for the winning of Pansy’s hand—but that in the meantime many things had changed, such that now, should he still be as devoted to the girl as before, she might easily find it within herself to come down, with all the force at her disposal, on the positive side. It was not, as in her mind she clearly acknowledged, that she wished particularly to see Pansy wedded to Mr. Rosier, but such an outcome would have the merit, the large, the illimitable merit, of meaning that her stepdaughter could not be married to a person of Gilbert Osmond’s choosing. And so, when they had come out into the welcome shade and quiet under the arcades, she turned to him with the bright intention of taking him into her confidence; he, however, on his side, somehow anticipated the nature of what she was about to say, and hastened himself to speak before she could get out so much as a word.

  “The rather fine piece I am negotiating for,” he said, “the piece resembling the one in the picture, is intended as a gift for a young lady.”

  “Ah,” Isabel murmured, on a long and falling breath, “ah, I see.”

  There followed a silence, eloquently expressive of the whole width of what it was she saw.

  “Her name,” Mr. Rosier confided, touching a finger to his moustache, “is Rothstein—Leah Rothstein. Her father is one of the leading dealers at the Hôtel Drouot.”

  Isabel nodded. “And may I be so bold as to ask if it is in order for me to—to congratulate you?”

  Her companion reddened, and looked down. “We have an understanding, she and I. I have spoken to her father.”

  So, Isabel thought, the deed is as good as done. Her friend would have, along with his saved enamels, a rich man’s daughter for a wife, and for a father-in-law a person through whose agency and insider’s expertise he would amass, in hardly any time at all, a new collection of precious “things” that would outdo in magnificence and lustre the one he had forfeited for the sake of Pansy Osmond. How neatly the thing had been effected! Isabel had known the young man as careful and shrewd, but she had greatly underestimated his swiftness in action. Hardly had the tears shed for one loved object dried on his cheeks than he had set about securing a replacement, this one with a father infinitely more amenable than Gilbert Osmond would ever be to the importunate Ned Rosiers of this world.

  “Then I do congratulate you!” Isabel cried, surprised to find that she almost meant it. “I wish you and Miss Rothstein all the happiness you deserve.”

  The young man raised his eyes and looked at her somewhat sheepishly; he made her think of a schoolboy who had been caught stealing apples only to be let off by the orchard-keeper wi
th nothing more than an indulgent smile.

  “I mean to try to be happy,” he said, with a throb of anxious sincerity that softened her heart. “I think it is the duty of all of us to seek happiness—don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” she agreed, though more in a tone of wistfulness than affirmation.

  Mr. Rosier gave her a look at once sharp and somehow commiserating, so that she asked herself if he might have heard a word from Rome of the circumstances of her departure some weeks ago from that city. It was a cause of wonderment to her that she seemed incapable of lifting her little finger without the world knowing of it, while yet her husband and his erstwhile lover had managed to keep hidden for so long, for so very long, their nothing less than gigantic secret. She had struggled to hold at bay the thought that she might have been the only one, in the concentric circles of society in which she moved, who was ignorant of what had been going on for years under her nose, but now it sprang upon her with all its claws bared. She had to admit it was perfectly possible that she had been living in a fool’s paradise, except, of course, there was little about her life with Gilbert Osmond, after the first few prelapsarian months of their marriage, that was in any way paradisal. But that everyone should have known! Oh, that was not to be borne.

  She had said her farewells to Mr. Rosier under the shade of the honey-tinted stones of the arcades, and had almost made her way in the misted sunlight to the other side of the immense courtyard, when she heard a quick light step behind her, and there was the young man again, a little out of breath after his pursuit of her.

  “Pardonnez-moi, Madame,” he panted, lapsing into that tongue in which he was most accustomed to converse, “je voulais dire—” He stopped. “That is to say, I wanted to answer the question you asked me when we were inside, and which I could not reply to, out of—out of—” He stopped again, lost in confusion and tensely turning the brim of his silk hat between his fingertips. Then he took a deep breath and looked direct into her face. “The answer,” he said, “is, yes, I did keep the blossom you let me take from the little bunch you were holding that night for—for your step-daughter. I pressed it between the leaves of a volume of the letters of Abelard and Héloïse—a first edition, very rare.”

  “And have you got it still?” Isabel asked. “The blossom, I mean, not the book.” Despite the pathos of the young man’s confession she was aware of the temptation to laugh at his inability not to mention the volume’s priceless rarity.

  “No. I didn’t think I could keep it, not when—”

  “Not when you had plighted yourself to Miss Rothstein.”

  “Ah, you understand,” he said, smiling his relief.

  “Yes,” Isabel said, returning his smile, “yes, I understand.”

  XVII

  Château Vivier was an exquisite small mansion built for one of the less conspicuous paramours of Louis XIV. Its rather low-set frontage of pale and pitted sandstone somehow contrived to seem always to be smiling, in happy contemplation, as it might be, of its own venerable yet ever fresh loveliness. It had been in Prince d’Attrait’s family for countless generations—indeed it was whispered, half in malice and half in awe, that the original prince of that line had been one of the Sun King’s numerous unacknowledged offspring, a rumour that the present prince’s wife, Isabel’s friend, took every opportunity to disseminate to as wide an audience as she could reach, and her reach was wide indeed. Princess d’Attrait, the former Lorelei Bird of Philadelphia, a large loud cheerful woman d’un certain âge, was the heiress to a coal-mining fortune of such stupendous magnitude as to place by comparison Mr. Touchett’s bequest to Isabel in value somewhat slightly above the level of the widow’s mite. The princess wore her riches lightly, and was known for her largesse in general, and in particular for the lavishness of her regular “occasions.” Isabel, having descended from her cab, was greeted in the glow of the pillared front portal by a gorgeous personage in scarlet and gold livery and a powdered periwig, who with regal tread conducted her to a vast, mirrored salle de dessin, which seemed to her at first sight to be on fire, so dazzling was the illumination—there were no fewer than three grand and shimmering chandeliers, suspended in a row—and so intense the hum and crackle of the medleyed voices of the company, gathered there under a magnificent vaulted ceiling with classical scenes of unbridled romping from the bright, perhaps too bright, brush of Le Brun. As she moved through the room, catching occasional and hardly recognisable glimpses of herself in the mirrored walls, she saw numerous faces of people whom she knew, or used to know, none well enough, or happily enough, to cause her to do more than offer a polite, wordless greeting and pass on. There was Mr. Rosier, in a corner, bent slightly forward from the waist, in a pose so habitual with him that Isabel worried for the state of his spine when he was older, examining with the aid of his eyeglass a cabinet of majolica figurines. When he chanced to glance up and saw her reflected in the glass, where she had paused some way behind him, he took on the look of a startled hare, and for a moment she thought he would duck down and scurry away into the crush so as to avoid having to speak to her for the second time in one day. However, she spared him a humiliating flight by herself turning away, with nothing more than a vague smile and a nod.

  Almost at once she was swooped down upon by her friend the princess, whose ample form was enclosed in an empire gown of pale-green silk, the skirt of which was overly voluminous and the bodice far too tight—Lorelei was a famously inattentive dresser, a reputation she was fully aware of, and was often heard to laugh at. Her costume tonight was topped off by a mighty headdress stuck with a bristling spray of brightly painted feathers, an ornament that would not have shamed a Red Indian chieftain, and that sat above her large plain pleasant face as if it had sprouted there. The two ladies kissed and exclaimed, as long acquaintance and the present occasion required, but then the princess took Isabel firmly by both shoulders and held her in place while she leaned her own head far back and examined the young woman with a hard and searching stare. “My dear,” she said, in that loud, twanging voice of hers, “you look like you’ve seen a graveyard-full of ghosts. Whatever is the matter with you?”

  Isabel dipped her eyes to escape her friend’s good-natured but unrelenting scrutiny. She was glad of one thing: if Lorelei, whose ear was never far from the ground, had not heard of the nature and cause of her abrupt departure from Rome, then it was likely no one else had, either.

  “You’re right,” she said, smiling, “but it’s only one ghost I have to deal with. I was in England, to be with my dying cousin, who is now dead.”

  “Ah, yes,” the princess said. “That poor fellow, Lydia Touchett’s boy. I saw the notice in the papers. Very sad. But come, let’s find some nook where we can hear ourselves speak.”

  They found, but not until they had made almost a circuit of the room, an empty alcove half hidden by a curtain of crimson velvet gathered at the middle and tied back by a silken rope. Here they seated themselves.

  “How has Lydia taken her son’s death?” the princess asked, plying her fan and keeping an eye on the throng of guests, which seemed much more numerous than it was by virtue of the many tall mirrors all round. “Much as she takes everything else in life, whether good or ill, I suppose?”

  “No,” Isabel said, “this time is different. The loss has hit her hard.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve always admired her—admired, mark you, for that’s about the limit of it. Lydia Touchett is not an easy woman to love, or even to tolerate, for that matter.”

  “But if you had seen her, as I last saw her, you would have been moved to embrace her.”

  “You intend that in the sense of a metaphor, I take it? I cannot imagine Lydia submitting to anyone’s embrace, no matter how sad the circumstances. I hear she insisted recently in taking herself off to America for her annual visit to her stocks and shares, even when her son was hovering at death’s door.”

  “Yes, she is committed to her habits,” Isabel gently respon
ded.

  “Ha! She’s a self-willed old woman who never bothered to learn how to comport herself among human beings!”

  Isabel regarded her friend for a moment with keen concentration. It was not like good-humoured Lorelei to sound so harsh a note, or to display such ire in her look; there must be, she decided, some secret history of strife between her and Mrs. Touchett. She would have preferred to let the subject drop—certainly that seemed the safest course—but she owed it to her aunt to enter one last plea.

  “She’s a woman whom life has disappointed,” she said. “That would make one hard.”

  Now it was her friend’s turn to regard her with a sharply penetrating stare. “You say that, my dear, in the manner of one who knows whereof she speaks. Have you been disappointed?”

  “Ah, but what life does not have its shadowed corners?” Isabel lightly countered, and dropped her eyes and picked a speck of loose thread from the front of her gown.

  The princess, all unsmiling now, continued to watch her. “I have always had a motherly feeling for you,” she said. “Though we don’t meet as often as I’d like, I think of you frequently, and fondly.” She paused. “And tell me,” she went on then, in a changed manner, bland on the surface and brittle underneath, “how does Mr. Gilbert Osmond fare, these days?”

  Isabel would not look at her. “He’s very well,” she said, in a tone as much a mixture of the bland and brittle as her friend’s.

  The princess nodded, with tightened lips. “I dare say he’s not disappointed, at any rate.”

  “No, I should think he’s not,” Isabel answered calmly, choosing to dodge the sharp tip of her companion’s pointed sarcasm. “He lives as he always has, very content and quiet.”

  “Well, he has much to be quiet about.”

  There was a silence, as in the moment after something fragile has fallen to the floor and smashed. This remark of Lorelei’s was too far, too free, even for her, and she had the grace to blush a little and sit back and re-set her shoulders under the tautened green silk of her gown. What had she meant? Isabel wondered, with a deep stirring of unease. Had it been merely a clumsy, and, for the princess, an uncharacteristically tasteless reference to the fact that Osmond had married a rich wife, in consequence of which it behoved him to hold his peace and count his gold, or was there, perhaps, a darker implication? Had rumours come from Rome, after all, rumours of things her husband had better keep quiet about, other than his good fortune? It was a question Isabel did not wish to address, did not wish to at all, and she felt a flash of resentment against her friend for forcing her to pose it in the first place.