Mrs. Osmond Read online

  He was waiting, was Mr. Osmond, watching and waiting, for one or other of two anticipated arrivals, and now he spotted, far below, along the windingly ascending road, a moving plume of dust that betokened, so he guessed, the progress of a carriage and pair. He had issued a summons to his sister, the Countess Gemini, which he had every certainty of being obeyed with more or less promptitude; she might delay her arrival, out of dread of what she would imagine awaited her when she reached her brother’s hilltop eyrie, but arrive she would, and this ragged, honey-coloured cloud swirling in the distance now was most likely the mark of her approach. The traveller could be, however, someone entirely other. Mr. Osmond had been left hanging for some weeks in expectation of the return of his wife from her exploit to England to visit her dying cousin, which he had reprehended so adamantly and, indeed, with such a monitory note of finality that had she been other than she was he might have doubted she would come back at all to him and her Italian home. But he was confident that Isabel’s inflexible sense of duty, that spiritual affliction inherited from her Puritan forebears, which he had found increasingly tiresome and which had grated on his nerves with a particularly abrasive sharpness in the latter years of their marriage, would not allow her to abandon him and all that he represented in her life and in her fate. She had written to say she would be returning.

  It was not the question of her return that had been preoccupying him for some time now, but rather the puzzle of what it was that had delayed her for so long. Her cousin had at last expired not long after her arrival at his deathbed, so how was it she had stayed away for all this time, and in what place?—for he was not even sure of her precise whereabouts. It had been his expectation that for the duration of her time away she would remain in England, biding at Gardencourt, where Ralph Touchett was engaged in the quickening process of his dying, or with her friend the ineffable Miss Stackpole in London; but then her letter had come, bearing a Paris postmark, and written on the stationery of that impossible, dingy hotel she insisted on lodging at when she was visiting the French capital. What cause had she to be in Paris, he demanded of himself sourly, when she could have been at Gardencourt busy meddling in and perhaps even managing to spoil her erstwhile suitor Lord Warburton’s impending marriage? The tremendous news of His Lordship’s sudden engagement to a noble and notable lady had seemed to reach Italy almost before it was announced, setting so many expatriate tongues wagging, and causing so many languishing female hearts finally to abandon hope of capturing one of the most eligible bachelors in England, if not indeed in all of Europe. And if Isabel was being detained not by Warburton, the nonpareil prize she had once spurned yet had never quite let go her grasp upon, was not that fellow from Boston, Caspar Goodwood, the Tweedledum to Warburton’s Tweedledee, still hanging about in London? The notion that Isabel would not have been dallying with one or other of these preposterously persistent beaux at every opportunity that offered itself, reclining her cheek upon one or other manly bosom with sorrow for the death of her cousin as a pretext, Gilbert Osmond was incapable of entertaining. And compared with those two champions, who was there in Paris to entice his wife across the English Channel? The likeliest possibility, to Osmond’s mind, was that she had gone there to conspire with her friend, that frump Lorelei Bird, whom the Prince d’Attrait, a by no means distant heir to the French throne, had been fool enough to marry—for her money, of course, though even that fabled fortune could hardly be thought to justify the match—thus making himself the laughing-stock of half the continent. That his wife must be conspiring against him Gilbert Osmond did not doubt for a moment, given the previously secret matters that she had been apprised of in the days immediately prior to her wilful and precipitate departure from Rome, to attend on his deathbed that confounded cousin of hers who had made so celebrated a business of departing this earth.

  “Damn the woman!” Osmond muttered now, wrathfully shaking his head.

  This oath had been called forth not by the thought of his wife, but of his wearyingly troublesome sister. A little muscle in his left jaw was beating rapidly as he watched upon the road the furl of fawn dust, which seemed to be moving more swiftly now, and at the head of which could be discerned a pair of plunging horses and the open carriage they were drawing bumpingly along in their wake. The occupant of the carriage was as yet too indistinct to be identified, although by now Osmond was convinced it must be the Countess Gemini, that sister of his whom a moment before he had consigned to the Devil. When he was a boy he had wished he could have been an only child, and he still deplored the existence of his sibling, and would not have had her come today had he not a need of her.

  It did not trouble him to any appreciable extent that his wife had been let in on his paltry secrets. In truth, he considered them not as secrets so much as—what? Discretionary withholdings? Pragmatic suppressions? Over the years he had as good as convinced himself that the things he had kept from Isabel he had kept from her for her own good, for her own peace of mind. What did it matter now, the mistake he had made with Serena Merle so many years ago, egregious though that mistake had been? Time not only heals, he believed, it also in the end exonerates, by a process of enervation if nothing else. And, anyway, had he not paid the bounty due upon his carelessnesses? Had he not, as the priests would say, atoned for his sin? Yet it was a pity, to say the least, that the seal of the confessional should have been broken, and Isabel made privy to what it had kept decently concealed from her for so long. The strict maintaining of secrets had, Osmond firmly believed, an ameliorating effect similar to that wrought by the passage of time. This gentleman was one of those fortunate beings who are more than capable of imagining that a misdeed kept sunk out of sight for sufficiently long—some two decades, in this case—is not a misdeed at all; that it is, by the slow action of erosion, assuaged and neutralised and rendered harmless, like a shard of glass on the seabed worn smooth by the turning and tumbling of the tides. Was it not the case that his wife would have been happier, or at least less unhappy, than she now undoubtedly was, had she been allowed to remain in ignorance of certain hitherto hidden facts, which had been so mischievously hauled up from their hiding place and thrust abruptly into her hands? The truth, if there were such a thing, was cruel and disruptive, more often than not, in Osmond’s estimation. Besides, what of the sacrifices he had made, the risks he had run—what of the deeds he had dared?—in order to put matters to right and preserve the necessary, the aboundingly necessary, appearances? The things his wife had lately learned of were as nothing compared to some further things she did not know, and never should, if he continued to have the guarding of them.

  Her letter had puzzled him, and, yes, had alarmed him, too, a little; what was puzzling was always alarming to a man such as he, who prized clarity and control above so much else. He had never found his wife enigmatic—if anything, he had, almost from the start, despised her for her transparency—but the Isabel who had written to him a matter of days ago from the Hôtel des Étoiles was a person he felt he hardly knew. The letter might have been penned by a notary, so dry and stiffly formal was its tone. It was also peculiarly sparse in content, communicating only the fact that she intended to return to Rome, without specifying a date, and announcing that there were certain proposals—or was “propositions” the word she had used?—which she intended to put to him for his consideration. She had enquired after Pansy’s health and happiness, but had offered him no personal greeting at all, not even the formulaic “Dear,” a thing hardly surprising, given the atmosphere of their final encounter before her departure for England. Their exchanges of that occasion, brief but sharply to the point, had seemed little less than a declaration of war, and the silence that had reigned during the weeks of her absence—of course, he had not written to her, not a line, and her solitary missive to him had been a letter only to the extent that it was written on a sheet of paper and enclosed in an envelope—had the ominous suggestion of troops creeping quietly up the lines, of cannon being drawn forward over st
rewings of straw, of snipers being allotted their hiding places. He must be on his guard, therefore; he must not allow himself to be outflanked through an hubristic lack of vigilance and preparation.

  He narrowed his eyes now against the hotly glowing haze and, leaning far out over the stone parapet, knew at last the occupant of the approaching carriage; it was, as he had grimly anticipated, his sibling, the Countess Gemini. He turned back, removing his straw hat, and entered the house and paced through its shadowy coolness and came out at the other side on to the crooked little grassy piazza that extended over this flat portion of the hilltop. The countess’s carriage was already drawing to a stop here, and the lady herself got down at once, with all her avian, querulous quickness, complaining of the dust and the heat and the roads, firmly avoiding the while her brother’s impassive and unblinking eye.

  “I thought you were in Rome,” she said, fluttering past him and making towards the house. “You could at least have told me you were here.” These last words were wafted to him from the dimness of the doorway through which she had entered, folding her parasol with a violent small tug, a movement reminiscent of that of a hunter dispatching some wounded half-dead creature. He waited a moment before following after her. She had halted in the middle of the tall gaunt room, and now she turned and looked at him at last. “I suppose you’ve brought me here to shout at me,” she said.

  Osmond laid his hat down on the seat of a venerable oak chair with carved armrests and a lyre-shaped back—it was said to have been sat in by Savonarola—and slipped his hands into the tight front pockets of his trousers and surveyed his sister with a deliberate absence of enthusiasm. “When, my dear Amy, have you ever known me to shout?”

  “Your softest murmurs are a sort of yelling,” the countess responded spiritedly, with a lift of her chin, or at least of the place where her chin should have been, for this was a feature in which the lower part of her face was distinctly deficient, a lack which, along with a downwardly curving nose and darting and slightly protuberant bright little eyes, gave her all the more a bird-like aspect.

  Osmond thinly smiled. She had determined, he could see, on a show of defiance; he would easily put paid to that, should it prove necessary. When they were children he had perfected a way of taking his sister’s wrist, with seeming friendliness, between his long, slender fingers and proceeding to squeeze it until the bones and sinews inside it creaked, which invariably caused fascinatingly fat tears to form on the rims of little Amy’s eyelids and plop on to the front of her bodice, making there a random scattering of coin-sized stains. Thus from earliest times she had learned to go in fear of him, and to keep her distance when she could, although when he called, she made sure to come, and quickly, too. Today, however, he was bent on treating her gently, for he had a project in view that would require at least the simulacrum of brotherly indulgence. For her part, she could not understand why she should be afraid of him still; she was a grown woman, after all; she had a husband, of sorts, to whom she had borne children that sadly she had promptly lost, one after the other, with distressing inevitability; she was a figure in society—even if, at times, a figure of fun, as she had sadly to acknowledge—while he, for all his airs, was nothing but her idle fortune-hunter of a brother, whose wife had probably left him for good, taking her fortune with her, if she was wise. She did not doubt he had ordered her here to make her suffer; she had wondered that the dread call had not come sooner, and had assumed the delay was due solely to her being in Florence while he was still in far-off Rome, an assumption in which, as was now all too alarmingly apparent, she had been mistaken. He had been here, on Bellosguardo, for a matter of some weeks; why then had he held off from commanding her into his presence? Why had he delayed exacting retribution on her?

  She turned away from the quiet mockery of his gaze, and glanced about at the bare walls and the numerous pale rectangles where formerly his pictures had hung. It gratified her to note how distinctly diminished her brother seemed amid the absence of so many of his precious “things”; the image he presented, she thought, with spiteful merriment, was of a Christmas tree denuded of its bells and baubles when the festive days have passed.

  “Why do you laugh, pray?” he enquired pleasantly, as if desirous of sharing in her private jest. She was not taken in by the lightness of his manner: it was when he was at his seeming mildest that he was most to be feared. Receiving no reply, and seeing her bite her lip to curb her amusement, he leaned his head a little to the side and smiled, showing the glinting tips of his fine small square but slightly tarnished teeth. “Perhaps,” he suggested, speaking in the same playful tone as before, “you were thinking of the damage you inflicted upon me, and upon my marriage, when you last spoke to my wife, before her departure for England. That piece of devilment is still, for you, I have no doubt, a rich source of vengeful satisfaction.”

  The countess, as if she had not heard, went on with her slow survey of the room’s bared and barren walls. She was aware, of course, of who it was that had betrayed to her brother the fact of her indiscretions. Serena Merle’s gift for knowing what things went on—what confidences were exchanged, what secrets divulged—even within chambers most securely sealed against her, was as uncanny as it was impressive. Since that day at the Palazzo Roccanera when the countess, at the end of her patience, had drawn her sister-in-law aside and revealed to her the conspiracy that Osmond and Madame Merle had mounted against her and sustained over the space of years, she had often found herself pondering, at night especially, or lying a-bed restless in the hour after dawn while she awaited the coming of her maid-servant, what it was that had emboldened her to dare so blatantly to expose her brother’s perfidious secret. She had no great regard for her sister-in-law, whom she considered insufferably vain and pitiably naïve, and who she was certain looked down on her for her lack of intellect—what she would consider intellect—and the notoriety of her love affairs; yet that day, when the young woman’s cousin was dying, and Osmond, as was plainly apparent, had been so horrible to her, she had felt something for the suffering creature, a sort of irritated compassion—her heart, as it is said, had “gone out” to her, a venture which that tempered and well-tethered organ was rarely permitted to undertake, even in the most tragic of cases. Was she sorry now that she had spoken? If she was not, she had the strong foreboding her brother would soon make her so.

  “I hope,” Osmond said now, still with his head tilted, and smiling yet, “you will not have the effrontery to deny interfering between my wife and me.” For all the menace of his words, the smooth and urbane manner of their utterance made it seem as though he might have brought himself to forgive or at least to discount the injury against himself that he was accusing her of. But could that be? The countess’s alarm tightened another turn.

  “I do not know,” she responded, with a fair attempt at an insouciance she could not ever really manage in her brother’s presence, “that the telling of a few home truths could be characterised as—what did you call it?—devilment.”

  “Home truths!” Osmond smilingly exclaimed. “And what, may I ask, would you know of truths, or of the truth itself—or of home, either, for that matter? Your own life is hardly a testament to honesty and domestic devotion.” Relinquishing at last her pretence of carefree poise, the countess whirled about with a sort of strangled squawk and faced him. Before she could utter a word, however, he lifted a hand to silence her, quite easy still in his manner, and even laughing a little. “Oh, calm yourself, sister dear,” he said. “Let me offer you some tea. I shall have a table laid for us outside, in the shade. There is a matter I wish to discuss with you.”

  She stood for a moment, her lips still a little way open upon the response he had prevented her from making, then moved a step backwards, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. “What matter is that?” she asked; it seemed that, remarkably, the subject of her betrayal of his secrets to his wife was to be set aside entirely, even if only for the present. Yet she was if anything more uneasy now
than she had been before. The notion that her brother would deign to discuss with her anything at all in the world of any significance was so novel as to provoke in her a positive rush of trepidation. What new manoeuvre was he mounting against her—what fresh assault would she have to face, she who shrank so from facing the least of life’s unpleasantnesses? Well, she would be more daunted than she was had she not a secret weapon of her own to hand, for there was something she knew that she was sure Osmond did not, a thing that she was certain would set even one as well-shielded as he reeling back on his heels in astonishment and shock.

  XX

  The day had indeed cooled somewhat. The sunlit mist in the valley had softened from glitter to glow, and even the crickets seemed less desperate in the flinging out of their nets of scraped and numbingly vibrant song. In the shade of the house’s overhanging roof a little round wrought-iron table had been set up on the gravel beside the riotous rose-beds; it was covered with a linen cloth, and laid with all the implements requisite for the taking of afternoon tea. This delightful ceremony, so characteristically English, though gently anachronistic here, in the midst of so much southern vehemence of temperature and light, was one of Osmond’s more recently acquired affectations; in fact, the custom had been instituted at about the time, as the countess had not failed to note, of Lord Warburton’s appearance in Rome. That appearance had proved to be, to Osmond’s well-disguised but bitter disappointment, lamentably fleeting, the cause for lamentation being the fond father’s unfulfilled wish to marry his only daughter to the great man. Another well-gnawed bone of contention between husband and wife was Osmond’s unshakeable conviction that it was Isabel who, with much subtlety and deceitfulness, had prevented the marriage of Lord Warburton and Pansy, out of her unresting jealousy, and a simple determination to subvert her husband’s plans and desires wherever and whenever she lit upon them.