Mrs. Osmond Page 20

  The girl said no more, and for some moments Osmond sustained the tableau of the two of them there, the one smiling upwards and the other looking down at him in mute bewilderment. He dismissed his daughter then, in a kindly fashion, urging her not to delay in considering what of her things she should need to assemble for the impending journey, which in his airy way he had already made into a generally accepted intention, the realisation of which waited only upon the packing of trunks and the summoning of a chaise.

  XXII

  When Pansy had gone away to her room, there followed an extended interval of silence between the two persons remaining at the table, a silence perfectly placid on one side and sharp as a shriek on the other. The countess sat with her back very straight and her head lifted high on its slender pale neck—another of the physical attributes that was often remarked upon approvingly by her admirers—gazing before her, seeing nothing save the fact of her brother’s insolent deviousness. The joke he had played on her was plain: he had summoned her with frightening unexpectedness, knowing she would believe she was “for it,” then had lulled her into thinking herself safe and perhaps even forgiven for her indiscretions, only to spring upon her at the last all fang and claw, like a grinning beast. Oh, how clever he was, and how heartlessly gleeful in his vindictiveness! Her punishment for past sins was to be the future care of his daughter, for an extended period, the possible duration of which she had not as yet the courage to contemplate. The antipathy she felt towards her niece was of the mildest order—the limp little thing did not have it in her to be much more than dismissed for the much that she was not—but it could alter under the action of prolonged proximity to the girl’s damply vacant personality. The countess saw herself processing through the drawing rooms of England with the drab creature trailing behind her like a scrap of something that had attached itself to the heel of her shoe—or else she would be “it” in that dreary game they played in Britain, the object of which, depressingly vacuous though it seemed, was to pin a sheet of paper to the back of one’s gown in the pretence of its being a donkey’s tail. Yes, she would be laughed at and pitied and resented, in equal measure; the English had a special gift for mocking one mercilessly from behind a perfectly maintained straight face. And what would Gemini do, what would he say, when she relayed to him the news that her brother had commanded her to England, for who knew how many weeks or months, there to act as guardian and match-maker combined to his hapless and, so it seemed, suddenly superfluous daughter, as the girl made her bedraggled pilgrimage from one great house to another? It was certain her husband would give her no money—Gemini never gave her any money—and even if he were to fling a few coins at her feet, she had no intention of spending a cent of her own on this calculated caprice of her brother’s. No: Osmond must be made to pay for every last item of expenditure the trip should involve, from two or three appropriately costly gowns for herself to the safety pins the girl’s few scraps of apparel would require to keep them from finally falling apart.

  She had felt a touch of pity, the merest pluck upon her heart-strings, at Pansy’s plaintive cry of protest—“I have been nowhere!”—but after all, might she not say as much of herself? The places she had been to she could count on the fingers of her gloved right hand—and grubbily gloved, as now she noted with an irritated sigh: Osmond’s precious hilltop was just as dusty and dirty as anywhere else in this incorrigibly begrimed yet inexplicably lauded land. No doubt to the eye of America she would seem the typical expatriate and international “type,” but what did America know? Her life thus far had been horribly confined. Tears of rage and resentment pricked at her eyelids when she thought of what she might have done and where she might have gone to—where she might have lived, in the broadest and richest sense of what it meant to live. Baltimore had been her birthplace but not a “place” in the sense that Pansy had meant when she spoke of having been nowhere, and New York, where as Amy Osmond she had been sent “to be schooled,” as her father had menacingly put it, was nothing more in her memory than the clang of streetcars and the smell of horses, and a cold schoolroom on 14th Street and the glint of her teacher Miss Sweeney’s eyeglasses and the twitch of her long and narrow, purplish nose, as this wizened shrew-like spinster, a native of the County of Cavan, raised a ruler high past her shoulder preparatory to bringing the edge of it down swiftly and with a sharp and agonising crack on her recalcitrant pupil’s chilblained knuckles. In Paris she had met her count, whose title had dazzled her to the same extent that his person—swarthy, stunted and shinily perspiring—had repelled her. She was staying in the city by the Seine with a dull cousin and the cousin’s duller husband, the latter of whom had made Gemini, despite his furtive eye and glistening upper lip and curiously childish sallow little hands—he fancied himself a veritable Bonaparte—seem at least acceptable as to manners and deportment. For a week he had wooed her, employing his inaccurate and comically earnest English, and a month later they were betrothed, to his family’s consternation and her brother’s irritation—he was living in Naples at that period, and did not appreciate that his sister should, as he put it, “pile in upon him” by marrying an Italian and moving to Italy—and her own dawning sense of having awoken not into daylight’s muted reality but the blinding glare of a conscious nightmare.

  “What, Amy?” her brother said now, breaking in upon her reverie. “Is there to be no word of gratitude for the splendid prospect I have opened before you? Think of the opportunities England will offer—think of the adventures you shall have! You like an adventure, I know; you’re famous for it. I grant I may have been somewhat abrupt in putting my plan to you, but I assure you, I have been thinking upon it for some time, first in Rome, then here, on good old Bellosguardo—”

  “Where you have hatched so many of your dark schemes,” his sister bitterly interrupted.

  “Oh, come. I would have spoken to you earlier, but I was in Rome, and then up here, while you were”—he gestured dismissively towards the hazy valley below them—“down there.”

  He hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his brightly embroidered waistcoat—even he, most carefully conventional of gentlemen, allowed himself a certain leniency of dress when it was summer and he was at a safe elevation above the teeming city—and hitched his feet with ankles crossed on a rung of the little table; he was, his sister indignantly reflected, the very picture of ease and self-satisfaction.

  “My husband will object,” she observed.

  “Your husband? I care nothing for your husband—and neither do you, so don’t pretend.” He rested his eyes upon her for a moment, with a cold smile. “Do not seek to thwart me in this. I am not a man to be thwarted.” The countess looked away, tensing her nostrils and holding her head to the side, like a toddler at table disdaining its nurse and her insistent spoonful of gruel. The dress she wore, of a light pale gossamer stuff, was sewn at intervals all about with blossoms of pink batiste, which when she bridled set up a busy fluttering, like so many butterflies clustered on a bush. “It’s all arranged, you know,” Osmond went on, studying the dusty toes of his boots. “I telegraphed to Lanchester, who replied at once, saying he would be more than delighted to welcome my daughter and her aunt to Fernley Hall—you’re to stay for as long as you wish.”

  The countess gave a stiff and furious little nod, still with her eyes turned to the side. “And what, pray, is there at Fernley Hall,” she asked, in a distant, measured fashion, “besides the score of pictures by this painter you’re supposedly so admiring of?”

  “There is,” Osmond said, “a son—a son of a suitably marriageable age.”

  The countess was poised to reply to this with an exclamatory protest at her brother’s overweening presumption, both of Lord Lanchester’s easy willingness to relinquish his heir into Osmond’s clutches—Pansy would be of the least consequence in the transaction—and of her own preparedness to facilitate his sordid plan by acting for him as marriage broker. She paused, prey to a sensation she could not at first identify, th
ough mingled in it were surprise and puzzlement and a curious disquiet. Then she realised that it was, simply, embarrassment. There was no man more studiously subdued than her brother; even as a youth he had stifled in himself youth’s natural impetuosities. He had always prided himself on his reticence, his capacity to keep hidden from the outer world his inner wants and wishes. He had grown into the image of himself he had fashioned long ago—man and mask had merged, at least so far as the world was allowed to see. What had happened just now that he had lapsed into transparency? A year, six months, six weeks ago indeed, he would not have shown his hand to her so freely, so—yes—so shamelessly, as he had done today. Her brother had many attributes she would have wished curbed or suppressed, but his calm and quiet self-containment was not one of them, sinister though it might seem at times. When Lord Warburton at the Palazzo Roccanera had put his eye on Pansy, her father had been a model of restraint and urbane discretion, even after the peer had departed and left the girl to her foolish and fruitless passion for Edward Rosier. However, the father’s naked eagerness now to see his daughter married off, to Lord Lanchester’s son or another, any other, it seemed, was as vulgar as it was surprising. Osmond—vulgar! She had never thought to find her brother guilty of descending into such bad taste. The spectacle disturbed her, and made her not a little ashamed for him. Was it the letter from his wife that had wrought this transformation?—a temporary one, surely? Was there some menace in it that had caused him to panic and lose his usually unassailably resolute nerve? He had said his wife had made a claim on Pansy, but had she also threatened to take away her money? He could easily assert possession of his daughter, and even if he were forced to hand over the care of her to her step-mother he would do it, provided he could turn a profit on the exchange; but the money, ah, the money would be an altogether different matter. For years, in polite penury, he had persuaded the world, or the major part of it, the part that counted, that he was sublimely indifferent to Mammon and all the supposed good things that gilded demi-god had to offer, but his sister knew how sharp was the pain it caused him to be poor, a pain that his pose as a man of flawless taste and a disdainer of mere cash could not assuage or entirely mask. Should his wife abandon him and take her fortune with her, he would become again the polished nobody he had been before he married her and her money. It was, his sister felt sure, this insupportable, this horrifying prospect that was making him so giddy, so transparent, and afraid.

  He was watching the countess now from the corner of his eye; had he guessed that she had guessed the hidden source of his sudden unsteadiness? He had always had an uncanny ability to read her thoughts.

  “So you’re determined your daughter shall have a lord,” she said. “It will not be so easily brought off as you seem to imagine.”

  “I have every confidence in your abilities in this particular theatre of action,” Osmond lightly pledged.

  “If that’s a reference to my reputation as a woman skilled at snaring men,” she returned, with deliberate crudity, “I would point out, though it’s so obvious I should not need to, that I am not Pansy, and Pansy is most decidedly not me.”

  “Well, you must do your best,” he said, with brisk cheerfulness. “And I do wish,” he went on, “that you would soften that sour look, and stop pretending that you are anything other than delighted at the prospect of an excursion abroad. I have no doubt whatever that you will wring every last drop of enjoyment from it.” She looked away, biting her lip. It was true, she could not deny it, not to him or to herself: the prospect of spending the remainder of the summer in England, perhaps extending her stay into a mild soft autumn, stirred in her an irresistible excitement and sense of anticipation. “And don’t worry,” Osmond resumed, “you need not approach that coxcomb of a husband of yours—I shall put money in thy purse.”

  “Oh, yes? But whose money will it be?”

  Once again she broke off, alarmed at herself and the unheeding quickness of her tongue. Osmond, with no more than the shadow of an abstracted frown, was looking steadily at his boots where they were still hooked on the rung of the table before him. “I wish you to return home now,” he said, “and inform Gemini of my munificence in sending you on what will be, after all, an extended vacation, with no duties other than to look after my daughter, and after that instruct your maid to commence packing for the journey.” She made to interject a protest, but he held up a hand. “You did grievous injury to my marriage, and to me. Be glad that I am letting you off so lightly—more than lightly.”

  The countess gave a decidedly unladylike grunt, throwing up her head. “I declare, Osmond, I am heartily weary of you!”

  Osmond nodded, as if it were the merest pleasantry she had uttered.

  “Better you should be wary of me,” he said, and smiled for pleasure at his word-play.

  “Oh, I’m that too!” his sister replied, in a tone of tired resignation.

  She rose, gathering up her parasol and plucking at two or three of the rosettes on her gown as if to refresh them. Together in silence the two walked back through the house. Osmond’s gaze was cast downwards, and he had put his hands into his pockets again. Coming out into the piazzetta, they surprised the countess’s coachman, in his shabby livery, lounging on the stone bench that ran along the wall of the house, smoking a cigarette, which, at the countess’s glare, he guiltily dropped into the dust and trod upon with the toe of a scuffed brown boot. He went hurriedly to the carriage and positioned himself between the heads of the pair of horses, holding on to their cheek-straps to steady them, while his mistress, with the unenthusiastic assistance of her brother, mounted the step and settled herself on the dark leather seat under the shade of the canopy. It was time to spring her long-withheld surprise.

  “By the way,” she said to Osmond, drawing on her begrimed muslin gloves and looking down at him with a smile that might have been a smirk, “you are not the only one to receive a letter from a lady on her travels.”

  “Oh, yes?” he said, and a wary light came into his eyes.

  “Yes—Serena Merle has written to me.”

  “How so?” He stared. “I understood she was on her way to America, if indeed she is not there already.”

  “No, no, she changed her mind on that or, rather, had it changed for her. In fact, she is returning to Italy, and will soon arrive in Rome.”

  Osmond by now was fairly scowling. “Rome? I believed we were to be rid of the woman.”

  “Well, we are not. She is coming back to stay—to live.”

  “To live in Rome?”

  “To live in Rome.” The coachman had taken his place behind the horses and held his whip at the ready.

  “What was the cause of such an extraordinary volte-face?” Osmond demanded.

  “Not what, but who,” his sister lightly said, regarding him with a vengeful sweetness of expression.

  “Who, then—who was it persuaded her?” Osmond asked, in a voice grown thick from the force of anger and foreboding.

  “Why, your wife,” she said, then leaned forward and poked the coachman between the shoulder blades with the point of her parasol. “Andiamo!”

  XXIII

  The Palazzo Crescentini was disproportionate to the narrow street—named for a famously war-like family of the Quattrocento—which it might have been said to dominate, had it been susceptible of being viewed in the entirety of its imposing brown bulk. However, wedged as it was among a jumble of edifices almost as large as itself, and facing its opposite neighbour across a span of hardly more than the length of two outstretched arms—one had inevitably the thought of doomed lovers, their families separated by an immemorial feud, yearning vainly towards each other from one high balcony to another, their fingertips destined never to meet—it presented itself to the eye of the dwarfed passer-by as the skewed and beetling frontage of an urban fortress, or even a place of dread incarceration. Its windows were guarded by heavy black bars, like neatly spaced racks of spears, while the front door was studded with iron spikes tha
t might have been the tips of crossbow bolts shot through the wood from within. The interior of the mansion fulfilled the promise, or rather say the massed threat, of its outer aspect. The rooms were unrelentingly square and high and dim, and communicated a sense of centuries of haughty, ill-humoured brooding. As one penetrated more deeply into the house, however, one became aware of a steadily burgeoning glow, like that of the fabled light at the end of the fabled tunnel, until at last one came gratefully in sight, through a series of tall triumphant windows, of a garden rife with plantings in multitudinous hues of green and gold, of azure and indigo, of plush pink and velvety white and countless shades of rosy red, where now, in summer, the unalloyed daylight was a steady soft blaze and even the shadows seemed luminous. It was into these bright precincts that Mrs. Osmond was shown by the man-servant who had answered her summons upon the front-door bell. She stood a while quietly before the large glass panes, gazing into the heart of the garden’s sumptuous profusion. She was pleased to recognise, strung between two ancient fig trees in a sunny corner by a tawny wall of warm brick, the canvas hammock where her cousin Ralph had liked to doze of a summer afternoon, not minding the fiery glare of the Roman sun beating upon him through the dappled foliage. In the eye of remembrance she could see him there even now, his sleeves rolled and his shirt unbuttoned on the deeply shadowed hollow above his shockingly sunken chest. Although his mother had made the palazzo more or less her permanent home, Ralph had been willing to spend no more than a week or two with her there each year. On one of the numerous upper floors there was an apartment—Isabel had never been inside it and was not even sure of its exact location—which had always been reserved exclusively as the quarters of the signorino; so gauntly funereal was this chamber, as Ralph had confided to Isabel, that each night when he stretched himself to sleep on the canopied bed, he had the disquieting sensation of having been “laid out,” his nightshirt become cold cerements and the bed itself a bier.