Mrs. Osmond Read online

  She had ordered soup and now it was brought to her, but for the moment she could not bring herself even to taste it. Her aunt glanced at her and enquired if she were unwell, and when she said no, that she was only tired from the train journey, the old lady, whose appetite, despite her claims to the contrary, was remarkable and consistent, returned her attention to her plate of salume, the drifting odour of which Isabel tried not to inhale. She felt as if the entire back of her skull were stuffed full of hot wet wool. She drank some water but it tasted stale, and was tepid besides.

  “Do I take it from your silence,” her aunt enquired mildly, “that you prefer to dispense with the subject of your unhappy marriage?”

  Isabel tried to smile. “It’s a subject, dear Aunt, upon which there is not very much to say. In fact, I wonder if there is much of it at all—my marriage, I mean.”

  At this the old lady looked up once more from her meat. “Has the thing gone so far as that?” she asked, and, upon receiving no reply, continued: “In that case why have you come back to Italy?”

  “There are matters to be—settled.”

  “And do these matters include your step-daughter?”

  Isabel was struck that her aunt should fix upon Pansy so readily, and with what seemed a certain sharpness. “Pansy?” she asked. “Why do you mention Pansy?”

  “Why did you enquire of her and her whereabouts a while ago?” Mrs. Touchett swiftly returned, with the air of a compact, elderly cat, still spry for its years, pouncing on its prey. She rested her wrists against the edge of the table, with her knife and fork suspended at a vertical angle. She sat for a moment in this pose, seeming to ponder, and when she spoke, a stony coldness had come into her voice. “I shall tell you something I have never told to anyone before. When I do, I may regret it, and so may you, but that’s a risk to be taken, I think, in the circumstances.” She paused, and turned her head to the side, frowning and moving her lips a little, as if she were rehearsing in her mind the matter she was about to relate. “I once found myself in a position similar to that which you are in—at least, I assume it was similar, unless I have misinterpreted the things you have said today, and the many more things you have not said.”

  XXV

  There is a universal truth which the young are all too infrequently surprised into acknowledging, and then with a sense of having been violently brought up short, which is that, as they are now, so too were the old, once. We may figure it otherwise by proposing that every generation considers itself unique, and that each batch newly entered upon its adult estate believes itself to be enjoying, or enduring, experiences, discoveries and difficulties that are all novel, all singular, and all exclusive to them and their coevals. The world of the young is ever a brave new world, populated by brave young people like themselves. They are prepared to entertain the possibility that their parents may once have lived and loved, have rejoiced and suffered, as they themselves do, although they would have done so in a paler, weaker way, of course, and by now would have forgotten most if not all of what it was they used to know; the children of these vague amnesiacs look upon them and smile or scowl, depending on the degree of cordiality that has survived the rigours of twenty or so years of intimate family life, and, like ushers in the interval of the play, helpfully point them in the direction of the exit. The old, whom the young regard as an entirely separate, prehistoric species, as the aurochs, say, or the California redwood, are, in terms of experience, considered blandly disconnected from the doings and dramas of the current day, while their lives when they were young, in an impossibly distant, immemorial age, were surely as slow, serene and uneventful as they seem now to be; having passed from primordial youth to frictionless old age without the slightest inner disturbance or alteration, they exist as superannuated innocents, harmless, affectless, anciently virginal. It was therefore with the deepest astonishment that Isabel listened to her aunt’s tale of age-old betrayal, passion and pain.

  The young woman recalled the summer when she had first arrived in England, and the tranquil afternoons she had spent on the long, burnished lawn at Gardencourt, in the company of her elderly and, as sadly it was to prove, dying uncle Daniel, Mrs. Touchett’s husband. It had been a remarkably fine, long-lasting summer, and it was the old man’s fancy to sit in a wicker armchair out on the grass, with a rug over his knees despite the warmth of the day, facing the grand and venerable house of which he pretended not to be proud, tranquilly conversing with whatever desultory visitors might drop by, or serenely absorbed in his own thoughts and memories. He had “taken to” Isabel from the start, and often they were to be seen together in relaxed and intimate colloquy, the old man holding in both hands a big, brightly coloured teacup that was specially reserved for him, and the girl seated by his knee on a blanket of her own spread upon the grass. She could recall little of what they had talked about, but the hours they spent together had left her with the impression of having been the recipient of a deep fund of wisdom bestowed upon her with warmth, humour and an endearing diffidence. Could this have been the same man whose actions of long ago, which seemed well-nigh incomprehensible to the young woman, her aunt was describing to her now?

  “At that time he was not yet a banker, but a junior partner in a Manhattan accountancy firm,” Mrs. Touchett was saying, in her unvaryingly spare and measured manner. “It is no dishonour to his memory to say that without the money I brought to the marriage, money I had from my father, who died young at the height of his success as an investor in the railroad, we should have found life considerably less agreeable than we did. We were not many years wed—Ralph was hardly more than a babe-in-arms—and I imagine I was guilty of that complacency to which young wives are prone.” She paused to drink some water from her glass; by now she had before her a dish of ravioli del plin, while Isabel had managed to force herself to take only three or four spoonfuls of her soup—twice already it had been necessary to fend off the worriedly deprecating padrone, who even yet was hovering nearby, with his lips pursed and shaking sadly his large smooth head. But how could she hope to eat, feeling so fevered and hot, and so dazedly incredulous of the amazing tale the details of which her aunt was calmly setting out before her? “The woman in question was some years his senior,” this lady now went on, deftly stabbing one of the little pinched parcels of pasta with her fork. “She was the wife of another partner in the firm. We saw them socially on occasion, her and her dunce of a husband—as I say, I was young and much taken up with the care of a sickly infant, but surely he should have been mature and worldly-wise enough to have seen what was going on under his nose. But, then, perhaps he had similar private business of his own to attend to—New York in those days was as wild and unlicensed as they say the western reaches of our country still are today. At any rate the thing had been going on for some considerable time before I learned anything of it. Perhaps I should never have known, and it would simply have dissolved, as such things usually do—I believe it was no more than an infatuation, an amour fou—but there was a child, you see. Oh, yes, a boy. I never saw the creature, of course, but he was the cause of Daniel confessing to me, at last.” She broke off and, with fork suspended, leaned forward to peer closely at her niece. “Are you sure you’re not unwell?” she asked. “You look distinctly queer.”

  “It’s nothing,” Isabel responded, though her voice was weak and feathery. “I think I may have a touch of fever, that’s all.”

  Mrs. Touchett shrugged, lifting her eyebrows in the lightly dismissive way that she did when there was a question of the well-being of someone other than herself. She had finished her pasta, and now she set to mopping up the residue of oil in the dish with a fragment of bread held between two fingers and a thumb. Isabel looked on with heavy-lidded fascination, as if she were witnessing an exotic and arcane religious ritual. “They call this the scarpetta, the slipper,” her aunt said, showing her the soaked wad of bread. “Did you know that? They have so many curious and telling words to do with food.”

  “The
child,” Isabel prompted, effortfully pressing on, “what became of it—of him?” Her eyes had begun to scald under their leaden lids.

  “Oh, Daniel wished to keep him, and raise him as his own. He yearned for a son, and it seemed Ralph would not live. You know what a thing it is with men, wanting their name perpetuated and all that. Vanity, vanity and nonsense, a trick to allow themselves to think they’ll never die. I refused to have the boy, of course—the idea! The mother consigned the poor thing to an orphanage, and moved with her unhappy husband to Manitoba. Manitoba! Punishment enough, I suppose, for a creature of her sort.”

  She moved her plate aside and summoned the portly attendant and requested of him a tazza di cioccolata and, as an afterthought, a selection of biscotti. The fellow bowed and beamed and backed away, wriggling his fingers before him in a comical gesture of fawning servitude. Isabel, to whose hectic gaze everything had taken on a slightly fantastical aspect, watched him with a sort of uncomprehending wonderment. His scant hair, heavily pomaded and of a conspicuously deep shade of black, seemed to swarm athwart his expansive skull, and came to a point in a perfectly circular curl plastered to his forehead high up on the left side.

  “But then,” Isabel said, drawing her eyes back to her aunt, “but then Ralph has a half-brother, who most likely is still living, somewhere in the world.”

  Her aunt lifted her eyebrows again, in surprise this time, seeming mildly disconcerted. “I certainly never thought of it in those terms,” she said. “And now that I do think of it, I don’t at all like the notion.” Her chocolate and her biscuits arrived and were set before her with lavish ceremony, which she entirely disregarded. She was watching her niece. “Do you not wonder why I’ve recounted to you this sordid and disreputable tale?”

  “I fear I may know the reason,” Isabel responded, in a small faint voice, hushed by misery. At least they only put Pansy in a convent, she thought, with a pang of pity—they being, of course, the girl’s father and her clandestine mother.

  “You must be cautious, you must go carefully,” Mrs. Touchett said. “It would be very easy to make a tremendous mistake, at your age, in your circumstances.”

  “Yet Pansy is—” she began, in a plangently pleading tone, but the old lady seated opposite her at once held up the spoon she had been stirring her chocolate with and brandished it before her face to silence her.

  “If you please, I will hear nothing of your husband’s daughter—I will hear nothing of anything that is your husband’s. It is one thing to exchange chitchat about the likes of Serena Merle, a person of the smallest consequence, I have come to see, for all the high esteem in which she holds herself, and in which I used to hold her. But all that, involving as it does a child, all that is quite another matter.”

  “But, dear Aunt,” Isabel broke out, “I have no one, no one to advise me!”

  “Then count yourself fortunate,” Mrs. Touchett implacably replied, presenting to her niece the blank aspect of a sphinx. “Advice is another term for mischief-making, and anyone who asks for it deserves the consequences. One cannot be told how to live, my girl—and one shouldn’t wish to be.”

  “And yet,” Isabel said, with an unsteady and melancholy little smile, “would it not have been better if I had paid heed to those voices, including yours, which years ago, when I was hardly more than a girl, advised me against the course I had set myself upon, and the man I had chosen to be my husband?”

  “You mix words, you mistake your terms. To warn is not the same as to advise. I warned you against a person I knew to be unworthy of you—not, frankly, that I considered you worthy of so very much. I warned you once and afterwards held my peace. About the things I suspect you to be contemplating now, I have nothing to offer you.” She paused, still withholding of expression. “You said you threatened Serena Merle; since you mentioned it, I feel I am at liberty to ask you what was the nature of the threat. And before you answer, permit me to remind you that she is not a lady easily frightened.”

  Isabel was gazing again at a patch of the tablecloth, and some moments passed before she had collected herself sufficiently to resume speaking. “I reminded her there were things that, if I chose, I could publish abroad, in society, and in those places, even in America, where she could count on having a safe haven—”

  “Where she can count on board and lodging at no expense to herself, you mean,” the old lady sharply interjected.

  “—places where, if I spoke out, or others were to speak out for me—”

  “Voilà a certain countess!”

  “—her reputation, and the universal welcome she is accustomed to enjoy, could not but be compromised.”

  Mrs. Touchett, waiting for more and realising more was not to come, sighed and shook her head, letting her thin shoulders droop. “My dear young woman,” she said, “what are you thinking of? Do you imagine Serena Merle will be intimidated by the prospect of being made the object of gossip? Do you think there is anything you can say about her that has not been said already, time and time over?”

  Isabel, raising her head with almost a jerk, had suddenly the look of a hitherto meek young miss who has been pushed beyond her limit in the school playground. “She is Pansy Osmond’s mother!” she flashed out and, as if it were not merely a variation of the announcement already made but an extension of it, “Pansy is her daughter!”

  If she had expected this revelation to produce a tremendous effect, as surely she had, then on the contrary, and to her puzzled consternation, she was startled to find that it had no effect at all, save that of causing Mrs. Touchett to look upon her pityingly.

  “And Mamie Winthrop,” this lady now said, “was the mother of what you refer to as my son’s half-brother, and she went to Manitoba and for all I know lived out her life perfectly at peace with herself and her witless husband.” She paused, and glared at her chocolate cup as if it too, like her niece, might be expected to say something vexatious. “Tell me this,” she went on, “how many of Serena Merle’s acquaintances—I doubt she has any friends, to speak of—how many, do you imagine, would be shocked or even surprised to learn she had been your husband’s mistress and mother to his child? The world, our world, takes from people what it wishes to have of them—company, amusement, diversion—and blithely ignores the rest. You imagined Serena Merle to be your friend and mentor, you took her with you on your travels over half the world—paying every cent along the way, I have no doubt. Am I expected to believe that, in all that time and over all those miles, you never once had so much as a glimpse of a side of her that was less polished than the one she presents with consummate artistry to the public view?”

  “Why should I not have taken her for what she seemed?” the young woman pleaded, twisting her napkin into knots in her agitation and distress. “Everyone sang her praises and said she was a wonder. Even Ralph confessed to having been in love with her once”—here Mrs. Touchett interjected a derisive “Ha!”—“while you said there was nothing in the world she didn’t know and couldn’t do.”

  “And was I not right? Have you not discovered, to your cost, that there is nothing she’s not capable of?”

  “Ah, you didn’t mean it in that way!” the girl softly cried—for in the course of this exchange the married woman had become as a chit of a thing again, defenceless, lost and alone. “You didn’t mean it as a warning to me.”

  “I didn’t know you needed warning, then. I already told you, some time ago, that in those days, when I could see you had become a gleam in Osmond’s calculating eye, your Madame Merle assured me that if there were to be the slightest danger of that gleam catching fire, she would make it her business to extinguish it herself.”

  Isabel at once seized on this. “And you believed her!” she well-nigh whooped. “You were as easily taken in as I was myself!”

  “I am never easily taken in!” Mrs. Touchett magisterially pronounced. “And that I was deceived, quite calculatedly so, on that occasion, is only proof of the woman’s skill—”

&
nbsp; “As a liar?”

  “—as an arranger of matters to her own advantage, and to the advantage of those few around her whom she chooses to favour!” She stopped, and allowed some moments of silence to pass, during which interval she sat and coldly contemplated the suffering creature seated before her at the table. “I repeat, you said to me she made a convenience of you. Do you remember what I replied? I said it is what she does—she makes a convenience of everyone, in one way or another.”

  The table was quite cleared of the remains of their repast—Isabel’s soup, hardly touched and with unsightly congealings floating on the surface, had been snatched up and borne away in a flurry of wordless reproach—and now Mrs. Touchett signalled for the bill. While it was awaited, the two women looked about the low brown room in the vague, distracted way that people in restaurants often do, when the little drama of luncheon has come to a close and the afternoon looms vacantly ahead. Then Isabel stirred herself and asked: “But if she’s not afraid of a scandal—if she’s not afraid of me—why did she allow me to persuade her to come back?”