Mrs. Osmond Read online

  Was it for this that she had jumped up from the table at the Caffè della Ferrovia and hurried here, so she might know from one at least of the spectators to her ugly little tragedy how numerous was the audience that sat, invisible to her, out there in the gloom beyond the limelight, watching in avid enjoyment as she strode upon the stage, reciting lines devised for her, did she but know it, by a pair of minds possessed of an unsurpassed genius for plausible artifice?

  The span of Mrs. Touchett’s interest in the affairs of others was exceedingly narrow. Having had her moment of insight into the nature of the clever coup, as she considered it, that Isabel had effected in persuading Madame Merle to return to Italy and be a poisoned thorn in Gilbert Osmond’s side, her thoughts had veered vaguely elsewhere, and then settled, with bathetic abruptness, upon the notion of luncheon. She professed to having long ago lost her appetite in general, but there was an osteria on the other side of the Arno she had recently chanced upon—“modest in price, and the staff are civil”—which she had got into the way of patronising, and now she suggested they might go there, while it was still early and the ravening tourists would not yet be out in quest of bistecca alla fiorentina, which was, according to Mrs. Touchett, the one thing visitors to the city insisted upon, for lunch and dinner, and probably for breakfast too, if they happened to hail from Texas, or some other place of hearty eaters on the wild frontier. She called up her carriage, which, it being too wide to enter the vicolo, they had to reach by traversing the garden along a narrow pathway that led to the coach-house. Isabel, pacing behind her aunt, was assailed by the intensity of the day’s heat and the mingled multitude of fragrances all around her, and grew dizzy and even feared for a moment that she might faint. Mrs. Touchett, ahead of her, having despite her years the constitution and sureness of foot of a chamois, never faltered for a moment, even though she had left her cane behind and carried instead a rather shabby lace parasol. She had changed into cream-coloured tulle—“I don’t know why I should bother with mourning weeds, since it’s the custom nowadays for every woman of fashion over thirty to wear them”—and sported a large straw hat, of questionable vintage, with a faded pink band and a haphazardly swooping brim. She spoke without turning, and Isabel, light-headed and distracted, caught little of what she said.

  Isabel found herself wishing now, and in the agitations of the moment it was a fervent wish, that she had not been so capricious as to stop at Florence, but had gone on to Rome as she had at the outset intended; she would enquire at the restaurant for a railway timetable, and find a suitable evening train to take her southwards. Then she remembered—she was amazed to have forgotten it, even for a moment!—that her husband was here in Florence; he was the object towards which she had been aimed, and therefore there was no necessity for her to proceed onwards to Rome. Yet the thought of encountering him here, rather than in the capital, was oddly unnerving. Perhaps, then, she should press on to Rome, and wait there for his return. Yet if she were to leave, and he discovered she had been here, he would assume she had fled because her nerve had failed her. It would give him much satisfaction to think it, she had no doubt of that. But who was there who would tell him she had been here and gone? Only her aunt would know of her having stopped in Florence, and there was little likelihood of that lady being in communication with anyone at Bellosguardo. All the same, it would be cowardly to go: Fate, who was wiser far than she, had intervened to place her and her husband in the same city, and who was she to flout the goddess’s crafty contrivances?

  In the carriage she still felt feverish and unsteady, and at a point in her brow mid-way between her eyes there was a pain, as sharp as if she were being pierced by the point of a needle, that made her yearn for a soft cool cushion to lean her forehead on. Again she wondered if she might be “coming down” with something: perhaps she had contracted one of the mysterious maladies to which this city, in its unhealthily low-lying river valley, was notoriously prone, and which each season felled as many of the visiting consumers of bistecca as would fill a fleet of charabancs. Mrs. Touchett, who regarded all illnesses short of the killing kind as mere self-indulgence, sat forward on the carriage seat with the hook-like fingers of both hands entwined on the crook of her parasol, taking in the passing scene with an expression of lively disdain; she had lived in Florence for very many years but had few acquaintances here, and fewer friends, either among the city’s native population or its extensive community of Anglophone expatriates. Formerly Madame Merle had been for her the ne plus ultra among women, a person of unparalleled accomplishment, learning and manners, who could play Scarlatti and scala quaranta with equal skill and gracefulness, the glowing grandeur of whose presence enlivened the dullest soirée, and whose wit shone with a brilliance equal to that of the most brilliant of dinner-party guests. “She has been everywhere, and she knows everything,” her admirer would declare, and cast about with a gimlet eye to know if anyone should be rash enough to contradict her. The door at Gardencourt was ever open to Serena Merle—Ralph Touchett used to say he had once been in love with her, although Isabel had taken it as no more than another of her cousin’s gnomic jests—and annually the two ladies would spend a month or six weeks in each other’s company at one of the more exclusive European spas, where it was understood by hoteliers, restaurateurs and bath attendants alike that all accounts should be laid, without comment or question, to Mrs. Touchett’s name. However, after the favoured one’s precipitate departure from Italy—or desperate scramble, as some preferred—her star in Mrs. Touchett’s sky had not waned so much as plunged through the ether in a burning blur.

  Overheated accounts of the exact cause of Madame Merle’s going, as propounded by the knowing ones of Florence and Rome, ranged from the unexpected acquisition of a goldmine bequeathed to her by a prospector uncle in the far western states of her native land, to a squalid but expertly managed escape from a jostling throng of creditors, all waving fistfuls of unsettled bills and angrily shouting her name. At the same time, those who thought they knew the lady best contented themselves with a meaning smile and the fleeting light tap of a finger to the side of the nose; among these wise ones the watchword was a murmured “Cherchez l’homme!,” since Serena Merle, for all that she was not beautiful, and furthermore had slipped by a ledge or two down the far slope of the peak of her prime, still maintained intact the greater part of that smoothly enigmatic magnificence—as sheer and shining as the Matterhorn itself—which yet could cause a uomo suscettibile to contemplate kicking over the traces of a marriage, and even of a career, to follow in her entrancingly fragrant train. Mrs. Touchett, while she would not have dreamed of stooping to such vulgar speculations, found her curiosity piqued by the confounding fact that Madame Merle should have changed her mind, at the urging of a woman she had wronged, and agreed to return, and to return not to Florence but to Rome, at that, a city she had always claimed to consider ugly, provincial and uncouth.

  “Tell me, if you care to,” the old lady asked now of her niece, “by what means you persuaded her to come back—for I should have thought so strong-willed a person not at all persuadable.” What she had refrained from adding, as Isabel was well aware, was that she could not think how such a one as Madame Merle could be persuaded by such a one as she.

  They were crossing a bridge; below them the river was the colour and, at least to look at, the texture also of stale mustard, a sight that, along with the day’s flabby heat and the awful brown scent of their horses wafting back over her, caused our heroine, feeling already less than robust, to feel more queasy still. This river, so flat and sluggish as to seem not to be moving at all, had often struck her as the aptest emblem, for her, of the city where her fate had been sealed, and where her life had been printed with the insidious watermark that she had only recently made out, against the merciless glare of the unwelcome enlightenment that had been forced on her by the Countess Gemini. It was here in Florence, at the Palazzo Crescentini, that she had been introduced, by Madame Merle, to the man who
, not by Destiny’s agency, as she had thought, but by craft and infinitely careful manoeuvre, was to become her husband. It would be foolish, she knew, to resent a city for a misfortune that had befallen one within its walls, yet she could not but rue, even again, the impulse that had led her today to disrupt her journey and step down from the train into a place that was rife with morbid memories. But then, she reflected, what was Rome, the day’s original destination, if not the place where she would be compelled to recall the slow and painful dissolution of her fondest assumptions, her happiest expectations? Her home, the Palazzo Roccanera, was well-named, for it was there that she had run up against the immovable black rock of failure—the failure of her marriage, the failure of herself, her failure—like the engine of a steam train rounding a bend and colliding full-tilt with a boulder fallen on the track.

  It was not until they had arrived at the humble and pleasantly muddled little Osteria del Fiume, and had been seated, by the great-girthed and gloriously beaming padrone, at a plain square table with a red-and-white-checked cloth, that Isabel at last gave her aunt an answer to the question she had posed in the carriage all of a quarter of an hour ago.

  “I made her a threat, and a proposition,” she said.

  Despite the interval that had elapsed, Mrs. Touchett had no difficulty in knowing to what and to whom her niece was referring.

  “Well, it certainly proved an effective combination, if what you tell me is the case, and Madame Merle is to come back to us,” she said, in her accustomed dry and matter-of-fact fashion. “May one enquire as to the sweetness of the carrot, and the rigidity of the stick? The latter, I guess, was an offshoot of your marriage.”

  Isabel, staring absently at a carafe of suspiciously cloudy water that had been set in front of her on the table, was slow to respond. “My marriage?” she said vaguely.

  “I am assuming that your husband and Serena Merle were—how should one say?—conspiring against you. Am I mistaken?”

  Isabel looked at her with an expression of deep perplexity, as if she were unable to comprehend not only the question, but even the meaning of the words in which it had been couched. “What conspiring?” she asked.

  Mrs. Touchett lifted up the gold nippers and set them on the bridge of her pinched little nose and peered through them long and searchingly at her niece. Could the young woman be so dim, she asked herself, or was it a clever pretence? If she was pretending, then her sister’s youngest daughter was blessed with a histrionic gift that no other member of the family, not even her feckless father, had shown the least suspicion of possessing.

  “The conspiring, my dear niece,” Mrs. Touchett said, with as weighty an emphasis as one so light and spare as she could muster, “that a woman so subtle and silvery of tongue as Serena Merle and a man so conceited and susceptible to flattery as your husband might be expected to engage in. Are you that innocent? Should you need to see Mr. Hawthorne’s scarlet letter daubed on Serena Merle’s handsome bosom before crediting what she is capable of? And don’t imagine yourself singled out—she has ruined many a marriage besides yours.”

  “I thought you were her friend.”

  “I admired her, I admire her still, and may admire her again, when she returns to Italy—and what of it? If one were to choose one’s intimate acquaintances on the state of their morals one should lead an exceedingly isolated life. I must say,” she went on with a thoughtful frown, “if she settles in Rome I shall see very little of her, which may be for the best. But why Rome, anyway?”

  “That was the carrot, as you called it, that I offered her,” Isabel simply replied.

  Her aunt eyed her again with a sharp surmise. “No,” she said at length, shaking her head, “I don’t see it. What of her oft-stated aversion to Rome?”

  “That has been cured.”

  “Oh, yes? And what was the remedy?”

  “I offered her an allowance—I bribed her, if you like.”

  The old lady evinced no surprise; it was one of her private satisfactions to be unshockable, and to show herself so. “You bribed her? To what end, may I ask?”

  “To the end that she would agree to live in Rome, where her presence will be, as you guessed, a standing rebuke to my husband and a constant reminder of his base actions.”

  “Ah, yes—she will be his scarlet letter, for all to see.”

  “I don’t care who sees or doesn’t, so long as he does.”

  “I doubt it will be a great penance on him.”

  “He must not think he can so easily banish inconveniences from his life,” Isabel said, with earnest insistence. “Besides, there are aspects of the matter of which you are not aware, of which no one is aware, except—” She stopped; she would not allow herself to introduce the gaudy figure of the Countess Gemini into the exchange, even if it were only by the uttering of her name. She looked at the tablecloth. “Is Pansy with my husband, at Bellosguardo, do you know?”

  “I have not heard otherwise. Why do you ask?”

  “The last time I saw her he had sent her back to the convent.”

  Mrs. Touchett nodded. “He has become a true Italian papa, locking his daughter up on the slightest pretext. What was her crime this time?”

  “She lost her heart to a person of whom my husband did not approve.”

  “You mean Mr. Rosier? Yes, I had heard something of that. The gentleman was going about pressing everyone he could think of to plead his cause. I believe he even approached Serena Merle. As well ask Herod’s wife to intercede on behalf of the Holy Innocents.” She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s Pansy to you, anyway? You were not permitted to be any kind of mother to her, were you?”

  “She’s an unhappy creature, a suffering creature,” Isabel said, in her plain, precise fashion.

  Her aunt sat back on her chair and gave her a considering look, so lengthy and so keen that it made Isabel fidget; she still felt unwell, and her brow was hot.

  “Does it not occur to you,” Mrs. Touchett asked, “that in launching out your numerous shafts of sympathy you may sometimes aim wide of the mark?”

  Just then their host appeared, in all the glory of his jocose rotundity, flashing menus at them as a samurai would his sword. Isabel had wished to interrogate her aunt as to the meaning of her curious challenge—who more than Pansy Osmond was deserving of heartfelt pity?—but the old lady had donned her pince-nez again and given herself up so thoroughly to the carta delle vivande that she might have retreated behind a wall. The young woman put a hand to her burning brow. She could not think what she might eat—the very idea of eating seemed hardly tolerable—and the words on the menu swam before her eyes, as incomprehensible as hieroglyphs. There rose then in her mind, like some ghastly clay-encrusted thing pushing itself up from underground, a youthful recollection, one that came back to her with dreadful and persistent frequency. She and her sisters had been with their father on one of the ruinously profligate dashes to Europe that he undertook compulsively when the fancy seized him. Stopping in some Swiss or Austrian city, Lucerne, perhaps, or Graz, she could not remember which, they had gone on a day’s outing to a preposterously picturesque schloss—pinnacles, pennants, pines—and were travelling through the outskirts at evening on the way back to their pension, when a carriage, smaller than theirs and painted a peculiarly unsettling deep lacquered shade of shiny black, came scuttling, as it seemed—with its taut domed black hood, the thing resembled nothing so much as a grotesquely overgrown beetle—out of a side road and veered into their path. Their horses shied wildly, and for a perilous moment it seemed that father, daughters and driver all would be pitched out upon the road. The other carriage did not slow in the least, but plunged past, swaying on its springs. Despite the speed and confusion of the moment, Isabel caught a glimpse of the driver, seeing him starkly and, as it might be, in utter stillness—it was as if time had been halted for an instant, in order that she might be afforded this clearest possible view of the creature, a view that stamped itself for ever on her young consciousnes
s. He was slight of stature, and wore a black coat and an old-fashioned stiff white stock at his throat. For all that he was presented so vividly to her eye, she could not have guessed his age; he might have been a man of middling years grown prematurely old, or a youth even, a sort of ancient, wizened boy. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin was of a faded, yellowish cast; his hair, swept back from a high pale forehead, was also a soiled shade of yellow, and coarse, like so many twists of straw. It was his eyes, however, black and shiny as wet coal and aglow with what seemed to her malignant mirth, that struck her with most force and fearfulness. His lower teeth were bared to the utmost extent—she had the impression that she could see the very ridge of bone in which they were set; indeed, it appeared to her that the flesh had receded entirely from the lower part of his face, exposing the bare structure of his jaw, which looked as dry and pitted as a cuttlefish bone.

  The encounter had lasted no more than a few moments, and then the bug-like carriage had sped on, and her father was cursing the demon driver for a blackguard, while their own horses flung up their manes and snorted, showing the whites of their eyes. Isabel was convinced that it was she alone to whom the creature had shown his ravaged visage, and that the others in the carriage had seen nothing of him, save his coat and his stock and one small white fist brandishing aloft a long black slender whip. But she, yes, she had seen him, and did not forget him, and never would. Why had he singled her out? What had he discerned in her that was not in her sisters? And what frightful message had he meant to convey to her? It was as if one corner of the fabric of the world had been lifted so that she might glimpse the darkness that lay underneath, the darkness and the dark things that were always there, waiting to crawl out and cling to her, and against which all her bright complacencies could offer no protection.