Mrs. Osmond Page 16

  It was fortunate that at that moment the princess’s husband chanced upon them in their partly curtained nook. The nobleman, who had a good many years on his wife, seemed to Isabel far more frail and shrunken than the last time she had seen him. He was of a fascinatingly reptilian aspect, his head especially, with its smooth, bony brow, and ancient eyes tapering at the corners, resembling that of a venerable tortoise. He was wonderfully delicately made, with skin as palely translucent as crêpe paper, and impossibly spindly legs, on which even when he was standing still he seemed to totter and waver. He wore a frock-coat and knee-breeches and silk stockings gartered just under the knee; the front of his coat was bedizened over the heart with a panoply of varicoloured squares of ribbon and bits of metal and twists of braid, betokening a surely foolhardy frequency of instances of valour on the battlefields of yesteryear. To Isabel he made a deep though not quite steady bow, and smiled, and mumbled some words of politeness; it was clear he had no notion of her precise identity, despite the fact that they had met many times before. Then he turned to his wife.

  “Ma chère,” he said, in so soft a voice it hardly registered on the air, “le duc d’Orléans a demandé sa voiture.”

  The princess rose at once in a hurried silken flounce, the feathers of her headdress quivering, and requested of Isabel to excuse her, as she must say a word of farewell to her illustrious guest. Then she was gone, with more haste and urgency, Isabel judged, than the moment would seem to require. The old prince bowed to Isabel again, mouthing some more soft and indistinguishable words, and followed after his wife. Isabel wondered if she had become one of those mysteriously marked persons, the carriers of an obscure hurt, whose company others found awkward to sustain?

  She sat alone for a while, vacant of eye, with her hands folded in her lap, her thoughts wandering in aimless circles, like a breath of a breeze trapped at the end of a blind alley. She returned once more to the question of what had prompted Lorelei’s remark regarding Osmond and the much that he should keep silent about; but it was a fruitless interrogation, and she soon gave it up. She had come to a stage of her life, had been hauled to it, like one condemned to the guillotine, when such questions were best left unasked, the answers being at once too obscure and potentially destructive. She had only to think of Rome to know the sentence she was under, and as she sat there in the little yellow-painted alcove behind the angle of the crimson curtain, she seemed to hear the big steel blade being winched steadily higher and higher above her.

  Presently, since it was clear the princess was not to come back to her, she rose and wandered among the busily chattering guests; it was, she reflected, like moving in the midst of a flock of flamingos, for the talk around her might have been the calling and crying of some such exotic creatures. No one stopped her to address her, no one called for her attention, and she did not pause or speak to anyone. It was a restful kind of anonymity she was being afforded, and she was grateful for it. She had noticed already in these past weeks how being in places where she was not known granted her a peculiar sense of security, and even brought her a grain of solace; it was as if her hidden troubles, clamouring within her for the attention of those who were close to her—but who were they?—settled down in sulky silence when there were only strangers about. But did this somehow mean, in the contrary and furtive way by which the mind works, that far from being content to be a public cipher for so much of the time, these days, she was in fact, without knowing it, going in hope of encountering someone with whom she was deeply and peculiarly acquainted, whom her anxious and troubled heart could jump up at, like a long-neglected pet, panting in eager recognition? If that were the case, her secret wish was about to be granted, but in a fashion that even her most ardent longings would find excessive, not to say grotesque, and that would elicit no happy barks or waggings of the tail.

  XVIII

  Her wanderings led her to a small salon oddly wedged into a corner between two much larger rooms, on to both of which it gave by way of two identical, tall and elaborately ornamented oaken doorways set at a right angle to each other. On one of the thresholds Isabel paused, with a cat-like softness of step. The walls of the delightful little space before her were decorated from floor to ceiling with watercolour frescos, delicately faded, in which courtly gentlemen and pink-cheeked young ladies disported themselves among sylvan settings. As to furnishings, there was nothing except two oddly innocent-seeming chairs upholstered in brocade, also faded, and a tall table with tapered legs and a marble top, on which there sat an excessively decorated clock, which showed the time, with complacent inaccuracy, as ten minutes after three. The company occupying the room consisted of two young gallants in black coats and narrow trousers with black satin stripes down the outer side of each leg. Isabel thought one of them was wearing spurs, but her recollection of the scene afterwards was too blurred for her to trust anything in it for accuracy. The identity of the third person, a woman, on whom the young men appeared to be attending with a more than usual intensity of interest, was at first obscured from Isabel, and she was about to turn away from the doorway and leave the three to their conversation—grouped there so picturesquely, they might have stepped out of the fête galante depicted on the wall above them, except that they were far more vivid than the painted figures could ever have been, even in the freshest, brightest hues of their heyday—but at that moment one of the gentlemen, laughing at something under discussion, inclined his head to one side, and in the space thus opened there appeared, as if borne aloft on a platter, which was how Isabel instantly thought of it, the seemingly slightly larger than life-sized, handsome head of Serena Merle.

  In revisiting the scene later in her mind, as she would frequently find herself doing, Isabel for the life of her could not account for the disappearance of the two gentlemen. One moment they were there, and the next they were gone, as if they had simply melted away on the spot. It was a trick of memory, of course, but she found it remarkable for all that. Madame Merle was dressed in pale silvery-blue satin, the shade she favoured most—it set off very well the fairness of her complexion and her hair, which was the colour of rain-wet corn—and was holding a painted fan fully opened and resting against her bosom. She was tall, and broad of shoulder, in looks impressive rather than handsome, and wore her years well—she had for an unconscionable time been “somewhat over forty.” Now, when she first beheld Isabel standing in the doorway, there was no change in her expression of agreeable tolerance, assumed for the sake of the young men and still in place although they had gone; only a sort of fine fast tremor seemed to run through her, as if she were a statue of some deity registering, on her plinth, the deep and the terrible reverberation of a far-off earthquake. For a moment, too, Isabel plainly saw the woman before her resist the urge to whip the fan up to her face to hide herself. Instead she managed, of all things, a smile, which involved, as always, the slight lifting of her lips at the left corner.

  “Why, Mrs. Osmond!” she exclaimed. “I must say, you are the last person I expected to meet here this evening. Are you a friend of our dear, redoubtable Lorelei? I cannot imagine the prince would count you among his circle of acquaintances.”

  Isabel had to admit it, the woman’s cool air of self-possession was nothing but admirable. The only real sign of inner agitation she continued to evince was a slightly raised tone of voice, allied to a certain over-rapidity in the delivery of her words.

  “I thought you had gone to America,” Isabel said, putting aside as of no consequence to the moment the question Madame Merle had so smoothly put to her. “You said you would.”

  “I did say it, and I meant it. I am on my way there—I have booked my passage from Southampton in a week’s time. We do not all move with your enviable decisiveness and speed.”

  “I would have preferred not to meet you.”

  “My dear lady, the feeling is more than mutual, if I may put it so.”

  “Indeed, I hoped never to see you again.”

  “Yet here we are, by u
nhappy accident. Do you wish me to go?”

  “If either of us is to be gone, it should be I.”

  “Why, pray? I fail to see the logic of it.”

  As did Isabel herself, when she gave it a moment’s thought. She wanted to be gone, and yet she was held. Something had flared up in her mind, like a tiny spot of light shining in the distance on a dark night. Was it the flame of a lantern, to lead her forward? For the moment she could not tell exactly what it was—the glow was so faint and the darkness so large—but if it was a guiding light, this meeting in this painted room with the woman who had done so much to damage her was the thing that had applied the spark to the wick. Madame Merle, who had quite recovered her accustomed composure, was watching her with a quizzical eye. She seemed almost amused by the unlikelihood of their encountering each other in this grotesquely accidental fashion. But then, Isabel reflected, this was a woman who had lived for years among grotesqueries—for how else to characterise her pretences, her subterfuges, her so calmly calculated lies?—and perhaps a kind of infernal laughter was by now her only defence against the onslaughts of her conscience, if she might be said to possess such a faculty.

  “Well, since I am not to be required to remove myself, and you seem inclined to tarry, shall we avail ourselves of this suspiciously convenient pair of chairs and at least be comfortable? I declare, I must be growing old, for I find the demands these occasions impose upon the feet increasingly hard to sustain.”

  Here, Isabel realised, was her last chance to quit this room, to be gone from Château Vivier itself and the sight of her deceiver’s large, calm and by now entirely settled presence, a presence which declared with unmistakable complacency that, of the two of them, she, Madame Merle, with all the authority of her assiduously oiled and polished social armourage, was the one who had the greater right to be here, even if the Princess d’Attrait was Isabel’s firmest friend in Paris. But that light burning in the back of Isabel’s mind was steadily advancing and becoming brighter, to the point that she was held fast in its glare; it was neither a comforting nor a sustaining radiance, but it did illuminate, however garishly, a path that had been before her since she had departed from Gardencourt and the fresh-filled grave of her cousin. Crossing to one of the chairs she sat down quickly, like an obedient pupil taking her place in a class that was to begin that moment. Madame Merle too seated herself, with a far more majestic deliberateness, and after the briefest hesitation—she seemed not yet entirely convinced that Isabel would not change her mind and jump up and scamper from the room in terror of her—folded her fan and settled the rustling skirts of her blue gown about her knees.

  “I take it I am not mistaken in assuming that you hate me?” she said, in the politely affectless tone of one offering the opening gambit of what would be a scrupulously undemanding conversazione. “Certainly I know that if our positions were reversed, I should certainly hate you—indeed, I suspect I should regard the abhorring of you as a duty to myself.”

  Isabel considered for a moment, then lifted her eyes to meet those of her interlocutor. “You said to me, at our last encounter, that you knew I must be very unhappy, but that you were more so. I believe it’s true, and therefore I cannot find it in myself to hate you.”

  “You think me heartless, all the same. Yet I say to you that if I had a heart, then it was broken, and the pieces torn out of me, by—well, you know by what, without my saying.” They were both silent for a time, both gazing fixedly before them now, as if they were looking upon the settled scene of a recent catastrophe in which all they held dear had been lost. Then Madame Merle resumed, her voice softened by a sort of weary curiosity. “Did you not know, all along? Surely you must have, even if only at some unreachable level. Think back; tell me the truth.”

  Isabel turned and looked level upon her. “Did you believe I knew?”

  “Ah, my dear woman,” Madame Merle exclaimed, with a cold little peal of laughter, “it’s clear you’ve led a blameless life. You know nothing of the ease, the tormented ease, with which the sinner can avoid putting awkward questions to himself.” Now it was she who turned her head, and looked on her hapless compagnon de douleur. “Tell me,” she said, again with that air of one who seeks only enlightenment, “why do you sit here like this, with me? Do you hope to see me weep, do you wish me to fall to my knees and beg your forgiveness? Is it revenge you want? If so, I can hardly resent you for it—but I think it would be vulgar of you, and whatever you might have been, you were never vulgar.”

  Once again Isabel gave the question some moments of thought.

  “Not revenge,” she at length replied. “What I wish for is an accounting, but I don’t expect to have it.” She paused, casting about her a little in aimless agitation. “I’ve written to—to my husband,” she said, and for a second seemed a child confessing to some impossibly rash, adult action.

  “Oh, yes? And may one make so bold as to enquire what the subject was, in particular? I take it that since you have mentioned having written, you’re not averse to my knowing what you wrote.”

  “I’ll tell you another time,” Isabel murmured, shaking her head.

  “ ‘Another time’?” Madame Merle said, with a look of large surprise. “Is there to be another time, for us two?”

  Instead of answering, Isabel posed a question of her own. “Tell me,” she said, “what shall you do in America?”

  This enquiry, so unexpected and so at odds with the circumstances, caused Madame Merle again to open wider her already wide grey eyes. “What shall I do? I confess I don’t quite know. I have people there, in Brooklyn—cousins, and a very elderly aunt.” She shrugged her handsome broad shoulders and gave a sort of laugh. “Perhaps I shall throw myself upon their mercy. They’re my relatives, after all, of however tenuous a connection—they’re bound by common decency to take me in.”

  Now Isabel turned herself halfway round on the chair to face her neighbour fully. “Don’t go,” she said, in a loud clear ringing voice, as if she were calling across a chasm.

  Again Madame Merle had cause for staring. “Not go?” she said. “Pray tell me, whatever else should I do?”

  “Come back.”

  “ ‘Back’? To where, may I ask?”

  “Come back, go back, to Rome,” Isabel said, in a breathless rush. “Arrange to arrive in a week—no, in two weeks’ time. I shall be there; I shall see you.”

  “I don’t understand—what do you mean?”

  “I mean that I want you to come back and live in Rome.”

  “How can I do that? I have no house.”

  “You shall have a house, and an allowance to keep it up. I shall help you. This is my promise.”

  Madame Merle could only stare. “But—?”

  The remains of the question the lady meant to ask were to remain unasked, however, for Isabel had risen abruptly from her chair, and now swept swiftly from the room, as if her heels had wings.

  II

  XIX

  The valley was immersed in a gauze of glittering gold sunlight, in which the city, looked down on from the vantage of the familiar old hill, was the merest vagueness of domes and towers and sharply angled russet roofs, while the meandering river appeared a shining seam of molten yellow ore. If there was birdsong it was muffled under the throbbing canopy of sound thrown out upon the air by an unseen multitude of crickets about their ceaseless and monotonously vibrant labour. On the height of the hill, on a rose-entangled terrace, a man of middling years, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, stood leaning with the palms of both his hands set upon a mossy parapet, registering with abstracted pleasure the friendly warmth of the ancient stone. Before him the sloping hillside was an untidy but picturesque quilt of olive groves and vineyards, and there was a heady fragrance of old roses and cypress trees and dust. He was watching the road that led up from the direction of the city’s Roman Gate. He had always fancied himself a person misplaced in time; his was a sensibility more attuned, he was convinced, to a grander, more garlanded age,
an age in which his talents would have shone with a more vivid flame than ever they could be fanned to by the vapid breezes of the prosaic present day. He did not see himself among the Caesars: that world of conquest and cruelty was too grossly primitive for his taste; his was a spirit that would have been best suited, so he considered, to the civilities and exquisite subtleties of the Quattrocento. Today he felt somewhat akin to one of the nobler condottieri from those days, but sadly fallen into peril: embattled, ousted from the sanctuary of his castle of black Roman stone and driven from the capital northwards to this low Tuscan hill, to be his own sentinel, a lone watcher, menaced on every side yet nothing daunted, scanning the shrouded lowlands stretched all about him, preparing his strategies, biding his time.

  The reality, as even he could not but acknowledge, was distinctly more mundane than the fantasy it had pleased him this afternoon to fashion about himself, like a coat of gleaming mail. He had quitted the Palazzo Roccanera, his principal place of residence, out of necessity and by his own choice, in order to escape the rigours of a particularly torrid Roman summer, and had moved north happily enough, to Florence, his beloved Florence, and to these quarters in the old house on the hill of Bellosguardo where in former times he had lived for a considerable number of years after the death of his first wife. When he had married a second time and settled in Rome he had kept up the lease—sadly soon to lapse, however—on the big dim shabby apartment that constituted almost one half of the long low abode, with its jutting roof and forbidding windows and muddied-yellow walls, that stood now at his back. Most of his things, his pictures and other precious items, he had carried away with him to Rome, so that the old place, bereft of its treasures, had about it an abandoned and even, at times, a sadly aggrieved air. Nothing, however, could mar the magnificence of the position and prospect of the house, set four-square as it was here on its hill above the soft splendours of the broad Val d’Arno.