Mrs. Osmond Read online

  Sighing now over these melancholy recollections of her late cousin, Isabel stepped away from the window and seated herself in what looked the least uninviting of the numerous heavy chairs placed about the room. Anticipating that Aunt Lydia, in accordance with the custom of a lifetime, would keep her waiting well beyond the hour appointed for her visit, Isabel had brought a book with her, a neat and closely printed volume of Mr. Emerson’s essays, which she produced now and opened at the place, marked by a ribbon, where she had closed it last. However, she had progressed through no more than a paragraph or two of the sage’s ruminations on the personality and genius of the poet Goethe before her mind strayed back irresistibly to her own preoccupations. It occurred to her to recall that she had been seated like this, albeit in altogether other surroundings and other circumstances, though with a similarly improving book open on her knees, when she had for the first time encountered her aunt, or when, rather, her aunt had encountered her, in Albany on that rainy afternoon not much more than half a dozen years ago. And at once, inevitably, the old question struggled to rise up in her, so that she had to push it down, with prompt force, as by a shove with the heel of her hand, the question, that is, of what might have been had her aunt not lighted upon her that day and on the spot proposed to carry her off to Europe and to a new and infinitely richer life than she could ever have realised in Albany—but no, she told herself now, no, she would not, she would not entertain yet another self-interrogation of the kind, specious and dispiriting, that had so tormented her these past weeks.

  It felt strange to her to be in Florence again; in truth, it felt strange for her to be anywhere, so vague and aimless was her mood this morning. She had been gone from Italy hardly two months, yet so many and so momentous were the tests and tribulations she had undergone in that time that she was hardly recognisable to herself, but seemed a sort of Rip van Winkle, one, that is, who had grown old while her world remained as young as it had been when she was last awake to it. She had delayed her return for as many weeks as seemed conscionable, travelling in a wide slow loop that stretched eastwards from Paris to cross the south German lands and then turned south to Geneva and over the Alpine passes, until one day the thought came to her with a jolt that her husband might imagine it was fear of him that was keeping her so long abroad; this was enough immediately to stimulate her step, and straight away, in Milan, she boarded an early train bound for Rome. At Florence, however, she had changed her mind, or something had changed her mind for her, she did not know which, and despite her maid’s scoldings—Staines disapproved of the slightest alteration to even the most rudimentary of plans—they emerged, in the middle of the morning, from the thunderously reverberant station of Santa Maria Novella into a city that was already shrouded in a throbbing and barely breathable miasma of heat and dust. It was only then that she thought seriously to ask of herself why, perversely, she had chosen to pause here rather than proceed directly to Rome. She was not afraid of her husband, or of the confrontation with him that assuredly awaited her at the Palazzo Roccanera; on the contrary, she felt before that prospect a pervasive and almost narcotic sense of calm, of a kind that puzzled as much as it pleased her. It was as if she were falling, the way that often in her dreams she felt herself to fall, slowly and in some way caressingly, wafted about by soft airs, safe and gently sustained upon nothing but a kind of silken emptiness. She could not account for this singular, drifting state of respite, except to think it a form of reward she was bestowing on herself—but what had she done to deserve being rewarded, by herself or by anyone else? Or was it that this serenity was being granted to her in return for a thing she had not done, indeed for that particular thing from which she had desisted, namely the wreaking of revenge on Madame Merle for the enormities that lady had committed against her? She could have broadcast to the world a sensational tale of the woman’s baseness and treachery, but she had not, and her mind, if only for that act of forbearance, was at peace.

  Yet there were, as she was compelled to concede, a number of immediate and practical questions to be dealt with. She had directed Staines to deposit their trunks and bags at the station’s left luggage office, while she repaired to a café in the nearby Via della Scala, and ordered for herself a simple late breakfast of coffee and bread rolls; here at least she could make a little space in which to reflect and formulate a plan for the day or days ahead. However, it did not take very much reflection for her to realise that no plan was likely to present itself to her, since all her attention had been focused upon Rome and what she would have to face there; by stopping in Florence she had created an arbitrary hiatus, which, should she allow herself to luxuriate in it, would surely dissipate her energies and blunt the force of her determination to bring to a head the hitherto seemingly irresolvable crisis her life had arrived at. She had written to her husband from Paris, setting out proposals and informing him of what she considered the minimum required concessions from him for the conclusion of a truce in the undeclared war into which their marriage had degenerated; should she not be confronting him now, thrusting pen and parchment before him and demanding that he put his signature and seal upon the treaty of peace? Was she fearful after all of encountering him, and unable to admit it to herself? But if that were the case, the thing she was afraid of was not her husband or what he might say or do but, much more horribly, a kind of inchoate and unmanageable mass, like a congealed ball of mud, stuck with snapped twigs and bristling thorns and bits of broken leaf, that had rolled down a hill and come to rest, repellent and unavoidable, at her feet. She had thought to dodge the worst of the world’s filth, but here it was, waiting for her only to pick it up in her hands and bear it with her, to wherever she was bound.

  She had been hardly conscious of what she was about when she hurried to her feet and left the café and summoned a cab and presently found herself, in a daze of startlement, at her Aunt Lydia’s daunting doorway in the vermiform and narrow confines of the vicolo degli Albizzi. Was it for this that she had stopped in Florence, to consult the one person she knew she could depend on to speak even the harshest truths?

  Now, as she sat half lost to herself in the brightness of the garden room, her thoughts, or what there was of them, were interrupted by the soft sound of a door opening behind her. She shut the already disregarded volume of essays and put it aside, and rose from the chair and turned to greet her aunt’s entrance. Mrs. Touchett wore a gown of unadorned brittle black satin with a high collar and cuffs closely buttoned. The severity of her attire was only relieved, and hardly that, by a pair of gleaming pince-nez suspended on a fine gold chain about her neck. She showed less of the effect of bereavement than she had the last time Isabel had seen her, after Ralph’s death, standing impassively in the front doorway at Gardencourt, as Isabel’s carriage set off for the railway station in a shower of summer rain that was thronged with countless tiny rainbows, a gesture of valediction and consolation, as Isabel had chosen to think it, conveyed to her by her beloved lost cousin.

  “So you have come back,” Mrs. Touchett said now. “I’m told all Rome was betting that you wouldn’t.”

  Isabel had never been able to decide if the old woman’s habitual rudeness was intentional and deliberately aimed, or merely the result of her not caring a whit for the world and what might be the world’s opinion of her. She wished to believe the latter to be the case, but instances such as this, when her aunt in her first remark should have as good as likened her to a bolting racehorse and the course of her misfortunes to a steeplechase, caused her to wonder if this person too, like so many, so very many, others, held within her a deep well of vindictiveness and spite, of which her pose of indifference was no more than the cleverly camouflaged cover.

  “Good morning, dear Aunt,” Isabel said, with ironic formality.

  In her person Mrs. Touchett appeared much as she always did—to Isabel’s eye she never changed—except that she seemed hollow, somehow, in fact quite hollowed out and weightless, like a replica of herself fashione
d from carefully cut, thin translucent paper; also she carried a cane, although it seemed, in her pale-knuckled hand, less an aid to walking than an implement of menace.

  “We did not expect you,” she said. “I must say, your suddenly appearing like this is a surprise.”

  “A pleasant one, I hope.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  They considered each other then for a moment, wordless and guarded—like a pair of fencers, Isabel thought, peering through the mesh of their masks—then Mrs. Touchett went forward slowly, passing by her niece, and stopped before one of the tall windows, the height and sunlit splendour of which made her seem even more insubstantial than she had when she first entered.

  “I have never understood the glorification of nature,” she said. “Look at this garden—so crazily profligate. Old Tonio, my man, grumbles at the waste of so much good ground, says I should clear it out and cultivate melons. Perhaps he’s right. What are flowers for, anyway?”

  Isabel came and stood beside her. “It would be a pity, surely, to forfeit so much colour, so much gaiety.”

  “Gaiety?” Mrs. Touchett said. “You call it gaiety? It looks like riot, to me.” She turned her head and peered closely at her niece, going so far as to lift up the glass on its gold chain to aid her in her scrutiny. “You are pale,” she said, “pale and worn. Are you suffering?”

  “From what should I suffer?” Isabel asked, calmly smiling.

  “I fear you were born to suffer. I did not think so when I first encountered you, that long-ago day in your grandmother’s dreary house in Albany.”

  “Have I been a great disappointment to you?”

  “You have not been great in anything—that’s the trouble. I expected more of you.”

  “So did everyone, I’m afraid.”

  “Including yourself?”

  “Oh, but of course!” Isabel exclaimed, with a sort of rueful cheeriness. “I expected to do wonders, to perform miracles! That’s the trouble; that’s why I suffer.”

  Mrs. Touchett moved away and seated herself on the lower end of a chaise-longue upholstered in faded gold brocade, resting her cane against her knee. She patted a hand on the place beside her. “Come,” she said, “come and sit by me.”

  Isabel, after the briefest hesitation, did as she was bade. It came to her that, posed there side by side, they might be a pair of watchers at a wake, and for a moment the sunlight surrounding them seemed a heartless mockery. Her aunt was alone in the world, having lost her husband and, perhaps more grievously, her only son. On the day Ralph died she had said to Isabel, with all the force of her desiccated vehemence—she was not a woman who wept—that her niece should count herself fortunate she had no child, thus forgetting, or choosing to ignore, that Isabel had lost a son of her own, though of a much younger age. Isabel did not often think of the poor little creature, born weak and bound to die. Her husband had taken the death badly, but only, Isabel could not but suspect, from seeing it as a dereliction on the infant’s part, and an affront to Osmond’s legitimate expectations as a father. Or was she being too harsh to think so? She must beware a hardening of the heart such as her aunt had undergone over the years.

  “When did you come to Florence?” Mrs. Touchett enquired.

  “Why, just now, this morning.”

  Her aunt turned her head again and stared. “And you came straight to me? I am doubly surprised. You know your husband is here, of course, in Florence.” She saw from Isabel’s look that on the contrary she had known no such thing. “Ah, then you are not in communication with each other. So matters between you are as grave as that. I see.” She nodded. “Well, you can be assured it’s safe for you to return to Rome and the Palazzo Roccanera. Mr. Osmond has come up to Florence for the summer and resumed his former lodgings in that perfectly hideous house out at Bellosguardo.”

  Isabel required a moment to absorb this information. “That is ironic,” she said, managing a not quite steady smile.

  “Is that the word you would apply to your situation, yours and your husband’s?”

  “Ironic, I mean, in that I had intended to ask, in the humblest fashion imaginable, dear Aunt, if I might lodge a day or two here with you at Palazzo Crescentini.”

  “So you stopped at Florence out of fear of having to confront your husband in Rome, is that the case?” Mrs. Touchett enquired, sounding a note of sly satisfaction.

  “I don’t know,” Isabel answered. “Fear is not the word—I don’t fear him. But the prospect of him daunts me.” She cast about her, frowning. “I seem to be daunted for much of the time, nowadays. I wonder if I might be ill.”

  “You are not ill,” her aunt countered briskly, “but only unhappy.”

  For some moments neither spoke, as if to allow the old lady’s assertion to settle between them. Isabel thought to protest, but in order to do so she would have had to lie; she was unhappy—how could she deny it?

  “You tell me,” Isabel said then, “that all Rome is laying wagers on me and my affairs. Am I so common a subject of speculation? What do people know of me that so stimulates their interest?”

  “They know you went to England to be with my son in his last days, although your husband had forbidden it.”

  “My husband never forbids,” Isabel said, smiling at the matter-of-factness of the thing. Then she asked: “Is that all that’s said, that I went away against my husband’s wishes?”

  “Oh, how should I know all that’s said, or even a fraction of it?” Mrs. Touchett snapped. “I go into society less frequently now than I ever did. Besides, they say so many things, it makes a deafening clamour. And Florence is not Rome—down there they go about their gossiping and their back-biting with an energy we are no longer capable of, up here.”

  Isabel, with pensive eyes downcast, was smoothing the stuff of her gown across her knees. “Do they speak at all of Madame Merle?” she quietly asked.

  “Madame Merle? What would they have to say of her? She’s gone—driven out, so I have heard, by you, or by your husband, or by both of you together. The matter is of no interest to me.”

  “Well, she’s coming back,” Isabel said, in the same remote quiet fashion in which she had couched her question. “Is that not known?”

  “Coming back to where? To Rome?” Mrs. Touchett’s eyes gleamed like two black bright little beads. “Why did she bother going, if it was only to return? It was said she went to America—she sold her house here, did she not?”

  “Yes, she did; when she returns she will live not here, but in Rome.”

  Her aunt was looking at Isabel now with an expression of large surmise, in the fashion of one suddenly seeing craft and cunning where before there had seemed dullness only. “How do you know these things?” she asked.

  “I chanced to meet the lady, in Paris,” Isabel answered, still with her eyes calmly lowered, still smoothing her hand upon the tautened silk of her gown. “She was about to take ship for New York, or Brooklyn, that is, where I believe she has some family members surviving—you know she was born there, where her father was something in the navy. We spoke. I urged her to abandon her plan and come back to Italy and resume her old life.”

  Mrs. Touchett considered that she had long ago put herself beyond being surprised, but for a moment now she fairly gaped. “You urged Serena Merle to—?” She stopped, and drew in a thin breath. “Might I ask what your motive was, in doing such an extraordinary thing?”

  “My ‘motive’? You make it sound as though I had committed a criminal act.”

  “You told me, at Gardencourt, that Madame Merle had made a convenience of you—those were your words. I remember them because they struck me as indicative of a deep grievance. I didn’t ask in what way she had wronged you—I make a point of leaving other people’s business alone—but I understood it was connected with your marriage, and that the wound was deep. Therefore I thought it would be nothing but a relief for you to see the back of her. Why would you wish her to return?”

  “She too
was wronged. I didn’t see why she alone should suffer for it.”

  “Pish!” the old lady exclaimed. “No one is so tolerant as that, not even you.” She paused. “But wait. I think I see it.” She nodded slowly, narrowing her eyes. “You would have her here as an enduring affront to your husband—is that it? Have I guessed correctly?” She leaned back a little on her chair. “It occurs to me to wonder, Mrs. Osmond, if I have underestimated you, all along.”

  XXIV

  For many weeks, since the day indeed when her husband’s perfidious secrets had been revealed to Isabel at last, a question had lain deep in the thickets of her consciousness, like a sprung steel snare, a question among the many questions she did not wish to know the answers to, and would have preferred not even to address. She was well aware, as how could she not be, of the prurient delight society took in nosing out the egregious misdeeds of which it had no doubt all who were human were at all times capable; she also knew, however, that her husband and Serena Merle were unmatched for the cleverness and subtlety of their conspiring. That they had deceived her so thoroughly and for so many years was hardly a wonder—she had been the world’s most unfortunate fool—but from how many others had they managed to keep their indiscretions dark? At one of the Thursday evening “at homes” that in latter times she and Osmond had instituted at the Palazzo Roccanera—for no other reason, as she sadly acknowledged, than to dilute with the presence of others, if only for a few hours, the stultifying intimacy of their lives together—she had overheard someone declare, with a burst of brash laughter, “Oh, if the Countess Gemini knows it then so does all the world!” What in this particular instance the “it” might have been she would not stoop to speculate upon, for it had mattered to her not at all at the time. Now, however, the remark haunted her; she heard it repeated in her dreams at night, word for word, accompanied by the same gloating guffaw. Was she to believe that her sister-in-law would have been capable of keeping hidden through so long a time—twenty years and more!—all that she knew of her brother’s affairs, and of his erstwhile lover, and of Pansy’s true parentage? It seemed inconceivable, save for one starkly significant fact, namely the fear that Osmond inspired in his sister, which was the chief component of his power over her. Yet in the end the countess had broken her silence and blurted the truth—and Isabel that day had not for a moment doubted that what she was being made aware of was the truth—and furthermore had blurted it to the one person her brother would have most urgently desired it to be kept from. In the watches of many a night these past weeks, in London, in Paris, in Munich and on the shores of Lac Léman, Isabel had started from sleep, hot and perspiring, to find herself imploring of the darkness: What, oh, what if everyone knew?