Mrs. Osmond Read online

  Once more her aunt bent upon her a sharply compassionate, yet also disparaging, look. “I doubt she required much persuading. Consider what you were offering her.”

  “You mean—?”

  “I mean Rome! You tell me she has dropped the pretence of despising the place, a pretence I never believed in, anyway, for she often remarked, in that pointedly wistful way she affects when she is dropping a significant hint—she always had hopes I would give her money—that she would far prefer to live in a ‘real’ city, as she said, to rotting away in our poor Tuscan backwater, if she could have afforded to. Which now she can, thanks to your munificence.” The account was brought on a little earthenware plate, and the old lady leaned forward and perused it closely with the aid of her glass. “So you see, my dear Isabel,” she murmured, not lifting her eyes and still carefully computing, “she considered herself condemned to durance vile, and you have as good as bought her release.”

  XXVI

  The pair had no sooner returned to the Palazzo Crescentini than Isabel’s fever intensified alarmingly—she could feel it shoot up inside her, like the thin red thread in a thermometer. Mrs. Touchett, having no intention of exposing herself to the risk of contagion, assigned the patient a big room, light and airy, but daunting in its dimensions, high up at the far back of the house, and it was to there that the young woman, flushed and trembling, was straightway dispatched. Fortunately Staines was on hand to care for her—the maid’s first action was to dismiss, on the spot, with one of the more fearsome of her basilisk stares, the trio of female servants who had helped her mistress up the many and wearying zigzag flights of marble staircase—and ordered her at once into the unaccountably high four-poster bed, a thing so broad and long it occupied fully a third part of the entire room. It was on this vast pallet that Isabel would lie for many days, drifting in and out of hot and fitful sleep, like a log borne on the back of a tropical river through steaming jungle depths. At times she was delirious, and imagined she was back in America, in the Everglades, or the savannah, or some other southern swampy place that she had never visited in her life but only read descriptions of. She suffered also passages of fantastic clarity, when there bore in upon her painfully, with what seemed the profoundest significance, the most minute and trivial things—a loose thread in one of her soaked and reeking bed-sheets; the black and pitted head of a spent match lying in the trough of a candle-holder; a fly clambering over the Alpine expanses of her pillow, pausing now and then to wash its face, as it seemed, with vigorous rubbings of its front paws. Two tall windows to her left gave on to a scene of jumbled terracotta roofs and the campanile of a church or cathedral she could not identify; in the middle hours of the day the scorching sunlight pouring in upon her through the glass made her feel like a damned soul in one of the circles of Dante’s hellish regions, and she would call weakly for Staines to draw the drapes and deliver her into a sort of blissful twilight. The sounds of the city came to her as the buzzing of a myriad of distant beehives, although at other times what she seemed to hear were the mingled voices of an angelic choir, and she would feel herself carried softly upwards into an empyrean of glowing blue and shimmering gold—on one occasion, to be recalled with disturbing vividness when she had recovered, she saw herself afloat in the upper reaches of the Duomo, under Brunelleschi’s wondrous dome, sustained upon nothing but empty air, the stray strands of hair at her temples stirred by chance elevated breezes.

  Her aunt, of course, would not visit the sickroom, but Staines brought up with her regular bulletins of news from downstairs. The maid and Mrs. Touchett had, it seemed, forged between them, to Isabel’s surprise and intense interest, a strong bond of mutual regard, and often of a morning the lady of the house would linger at table after breakfast and, before repairing to the cubbyhole off the piano nobile that she had designated as her office, the two women would converse together for as much as a half-hour. Isabel was ever eager to know what they talked about—what they could possibly talk about—but under interrogation Staines maintained a front of tantalising vagueness, and even at times appeared to hint at detecting a degree of prurience in her mistress’s attempts to pry into what were, after all, private exchanges between two independent persons. At the Palazzo Crescentini the maid felt at liberty to seize for herself a degree of autonomy she would not have dreamed of claiming in any other establishment, not in Italy, not in France either, and certainly not in her native land. So the mystery of these morning tête-à-têtes remained sealed, to be added by Isabel to the ever-lengthening list of life’s insoluble puzzles.

  One afternoon, on a day when Isabel had begun to mend, her fever having much abated, the maid, herself in a somewhat elevated state, bore to her mistress’s bedside a rectangle of white pasteboard on which was printed, in modestly small type, the name of one Myles Devenish, a correspondent, so an even more minuscule line announced, of the London Clarion. This was a journal that neither woman had heard of. They gazed at the biglietto, the two of them, like young ladies at a ball puzzling over the appearance on a dance-card of a fascinatingly unfamiliar name. Had Mr. Devenish offered a clue as to his circumstances, or to the purpose of his calling upon Mrs. Osmond? that lady enquired. He had not, the maid confirmed, except that he had mentioned a name with which mistress and maid were both acquainted, which was that of Miss Florence Janeway, the lady at whose hard-to-find home in far-off Fulham Isabel had partaken of a memorably, indeed an unforgettably, verdurous luncheon, one sunny afternoon several weeks previously. But how had the personable young man—that he was of an appealing aspect was attested to by a certain suspenseful quickening in Staines’s manner—known where Isabel was to be found? He had also mentioned, the maid supplied, besides Miss Janeway, Isabel’s friend Henrietta Stackpole, to whom Isabel, as she now remembered, had written from the telegraph office in the railway station at Florence, on the day of her impulsive stopping off there, to apprise her friend of the interruption in her itinerary, and of her intention to seek temporary shelter at the Palazzo Crescentini. Now Isabel turned over the card in her fingers, but the back of it bore no message, being entirely blank. “He does not say where he himself is staying,” she murmured. So the two women, the maid leaning down by the shoulder of her mistress, where she reclined against a bank of pillows on the great high bed—an observer with an eye for such things might have remarked how uncanny a suggestion they made of a scene by Metsu, as might be, or the sublime Vermeer—continued pondering in silence the small but not unfascinating fact of Mr. Devenish’s unforthcoming card. Perhaps he would call again, Isabel ventured, but the maid shook her head. “He said as he would be taking the sleeper to Paris this evening, ma’am, on his way back to London.”

  “Ah, then I imagine his call was no more than a politeness,” Isabel said, “made at the behest of Miss Janeway.” She put the card aside, propping it against the candle-holder on the commode beside the bed; there it stayed, and although it remained an enigma, her eye returned to it frequently, in vague but persistent surmise.

  That night she enjoyed, for the first time in many nights, a sound and dreamless sleep, and woke late in the morning feeling rinsed and refreshed, as if she had been lifted up out of a viscous immersion into calm air and clean clear light—she was still of a young enough age that a minor malady such as that through which she had passed was less an illness than a curative in disguise, a process of cleansing and refining and reinvigoration. She had hardly opened her eyes before it came to her, as if a commanding voice had spoken in her head, that this was the day on which she would take hold of the staff of self-assertion and, like a doughty alpinist, ascend the hill of Bellosguardo and confront her husband. Confront: the word gave her pause. Gilbert Osmond was not a man to make himself amenable to confrontation; he would not stoop to anything so tasteless as domestic disputation, and abhorred the tedious “tennis match,” as she had once heard him describe it, of charge and counter-charge, between defensively obdurate husband and implacably shrewish wife. In the refined yet savag
e circular stalking of each other that their marriage had become, he had always the soft sure-footedness of a panther, while she was as a goat tethered to a post. Now that she had shrugged herself free of the rope, how was she to defend herself against his sinuous ploys? She could not win against him by direct engagement: he was master of the sudden switch, the diversionary feint, the flawlessly executed outflanking manoeuvre. If there was a smudge in the burnish of his armour it was his slowness in adapting to surprise; before the onrush of the unexpected he could lose his footing and find himself in danger of being undone, though invariably it took him no more than a moment to be right again and fully in charge of his forces— Here Isabel, rueful and amused, broke off the military metaphor; if it was a battle she was marching into, should she not have done with it and fortify herself with a musket?

  Scarce half an hour later, feeling remarkably refreshed after her bath, and seeming to herself like a vessel fashioned from glass of the finest and most fragile consistency, she made her way down through the layered maze of echoing staircases and deserted corridors—the palazzo had always for Isabel the odd air of having been recently abandoned in precipitate haste and disorder—and after a search found her aunt seated at breakfast on a sunny terrace, in front of which, beyond a low marble balustrade, the garden disported itself in abounding brilliancies and deep patches of lurking, limpid shadow. The old woman looked up at her quickly, and seemed almost to shrink away in frank alarm. Mrs. Touchett feared nothing in life save the prospect of departing from it, and regarded those tainted by even the mildest infection as potential and unconvincingly disguised agents of her extinction, and it was only good manners, which she prized as intensely as she deplored death, that induced her to bid Isabel now to join her in her repast. Isabel sat down beside the balustrade on a peculiarly unaccommodating iron chair—she often suspected her aunt of taking pride in the fact that only an anchorite could have considered comfortable those items of furniture in her house that were meant for sitting, reclining or sleeping on—and said that she would take only a cup of black tea and a slice of dry toast, since she felt as weak as a kitten. Mrs. Touchett mumbled words to the effect that perhaps her niece should have kept to her chamber until she was entirely certain she was fully recovered. “Oh, I’m perfectly well, really,” Isabel lightly insisted. “The fever is quite gone, and any lingering infirmity is surely the result of lolling in bed for such an unconscionably long time.” And she added, because now and then she liked to tease the old lady, “Don’t I look a great glowing romp of a thing, dear Aunt Lydia?” To this show of facetiousness Mrs. Touchett made no reply, and presently Isabel was brought her tea and toast, which she drank and ate, and afterwards the two sat together quiet for some minutes in the morning’s garden freshness. Then Isabel requested the use of a means of transport—“a dog-cart or fly will suffice”—for she wished to make a journey that would take her a little way beyond the city gates.

  Mrs. Touchett gave her one of her sharp swift glances. “So you’re going to Bellosguardo,” she said.

  Isabel smiled at her. “Yes, Aunt, I am going to Bellosguardo. It’s time I did.”

  The old lady was watching her still, with a little gleam as of amusement, or else of malice, or of both combined. “You are not apprehensive?”

  “On the contrary, I am extremely apprehensive,” Isabel answered, in her simplest and most straightforward fashion. “I fear my weapons are inadequate to the encounter that awaits me; they are lacking in reach.”

  The old lady produced what with her passed for a smile. “Then keep in mind,” she said, “what the Spartan mother replied to her son when he complained of his sword being too short: ‘Step closer.’ ”

  “Ah, but, dear Aunt,” Isabel gaily countered, “that sounds to me very much like advice, of the kind you say you make it a point never to dispense.”

  XXVII

  The day was delightfully fresh and clear under a sky of unblemished blue that bespoke the coolly lucid north more than it did the varnished south. Mrs. Touchett had insisted that Isabel must have a carriage and pair, and her coachman in charge of it—“Did you propose to drive yourself up that impossible laneway calling itself a road?”—and it was from the deep back seat of this elegant vehicle that Isabel, in the shade of her, or rather Miss Stackpole’s, parasol and with a light veil arranged about her face to ward off the dust, was free to gaze all about her at the low mild hills strewn with unmoving flocks of sheep and dimpled with shaded valleys, at cinnamon-coloured tracks that seemed to wander hither and yon according to their whim, at slender cypresses set in strict lines like shrouded sentinels—at the entire Tuscan scene, which was innocently unaware of its own loveliness, as shy and simple and finely detailed as a background by Piero. How incongruously at odds it seemed, this tranquil prospect, with the task and the sure trial that lay ahead of her today. But then, she reflected, doubtless the Louvre loomed as peacefully at rights with the world, to the eye of one borne past it in a trundling tumbril, in the sparkling sunlight of a revolutionary morning, as did to her these easeful Italian splendours.

  The carriage stopped at the purblind rear of the house, which gave by way of a courtyard on to the public piazzetta. Giancarlo, the major-domo, opened to her the big square door of time-darkened timber, a portal so broadly accommodating that Mrs. Touchett’s pair of carriage horses might have passed side by side straight through into the living room of what in former days had been Mr. Gilbert Osmond’s principal, indeed his sole, domicile. The old servant at first did not know her, confused by his recollection of the Countess Gemini’s recent visit, then fell into mumbling effusiveness, addressing her as signora baronessa, and forming his hands into fists and beating them silently together before him in a gesture of heartfelt welcome. The signor barone himself, he informed her, had gone to visit his amico americano, Mr. Boott, who with his daughter and her sculptor husband occupied another apartment, at the far end of the portioned-off house, but he would send word to him of her arrival immediatamente.

  As she stepped over the threshold Isabel registered a violent quick vibration within her breast, as if an arrow had come flying full-tilt out of the past and struck her quiveringly to the core. She took in, with a sort of soundless gasp, the mingled odours, instantly familiar, of oiled wood and damp stone, of polished brass and faded tapestries, of the must and dust of old damask and, behind all, the darker note of those little black cheroots, crooked and thin as twigs, that her husband had always favoured. She noted, as had her sister-in-law before her, the ghostly blank spaces on the walls where Gilbert’s pictures, a few of them executed by his own hand, used to hang; she looked for, and found, below the middle one of three tall windows aglow with blond light spilling in from the courtyard, the deep marks in the floorboards made by the castors of her husband’s massive writing desk of English oak that it had taken a full day’s labour by four hulking workmen to transport down the hill to the Palazzo Roccanera and its new place at the centre of the high cool chamber there that he had picked out to be his study. She had lived at Bellosguardo with her husband in the first months of her marriage, and to her the old place would be for ever associated intimately with the happiness she had felt then, that happiness a hidden component of which, as she afterwards came to think, must have been her ignorance of how fleeting it would prove to be. Yet however brief, how lovely, too, it had been, that precious time. What she had prized most was the calm and isolated life up here on “the Hill,” as it was known familiarly to its denizens. Looked down upon from this tranquil height, the world seemed far-off and indistinct, its angles and edges blurred under a dusting of soft Tuscan sunlight. Garibaldi’s tremendous unifying venture had been, so far as the blessed ones of Bellosguardo were concerned, of no more moment than the defection of a servant, who had run off to join the Prussian offensive against the French, and another who had broken some fine pieces of Limoges from Gilbert’s collection, and had to be let go under suspicion of harbouring revolutionary tendencies. Even Isabel, whose h
eart when she was young had been stirred to its deeply beating extremity by President Lincoln’s war of emancipation against the secessionist South, had been content to let her radical ideals lapse, which, as she would presently be made to understand, was well for her, since had she attempted to uphold them, her husband would have made it his business to strike them down.

  There was no sign yet of Gilbert’s returning from his nearby visit—she thought it probable he had been informed of her presence, as Giancarlo had said he would be, and that he intended his delay to be taken as a conscious and deliberate slighting of her—and she set herself to pacing slowly among the rooms of the apartment. As she went she revisited in her mind scenes from that old time, scenes that were for her as distant as the battles of Bull Run and the Wilderness and, like those titanic and desperate engagements, graspable by her only through an effort of imaginative figuring. Hollow and depleted as the place seemed, she felt herself to be a phantom presence in it. Her husband, before her coming, had been happy on the hill, but the space he had to make do with, out of financial considerations—rentals on Bellosguardo, even by the standards of Italy, were irresistibly modest—hardly constituted the storeyed ivory tower to which he considered his talents and his taste should have entitled him. Isabel recalled the perverse pleasure he had derived from taking her on a tour of what he referred to, with high ironical disdain, as his “quarters.” He had brought her up here to the house with the express aim of acquainting her with the pains and privations he had been compelled to endure before the advent of her and her money—they were not yet married, but the wedding was a matter of days off, and, as she imagined now, he was sure enough of her to risk disclosing to her a harsher side of his peculiar humour than she had yet been exposed to. “It is an old house, and you must see it entirely, front and rear, in all its splendour and its squalor,” he had said to her, with steely jocularity, pressing a finger to her elbow and leading her lightly forward. Far at the back somewhere—she had never again returned to the spot—they had entered through a low doorway into a dim, dank and horridly noisome cell with a slit for a window and wet moss on the walls, and limp black pod-like things suspended from the ceiling that Isabel suspected were the birthing-cauls of bats. In one corner an open sluice of rough stone was set at a falling angle into a hole cut in the wall, and to this her fiancé drew her particular attention. “As you see, my dear, there are all the conveniences a medieval casa signorile could be expected to offer.” And he had smiled, compressing his greyish lips and moving them a little against each other, as if he were rolling a tiny morsel of something between them, such as a hard little seed, or a grain of sand. She had looked at him in wondering uncertainty; never had his grizzled beard seemed so artfully sleek, or the waxed and upturned tips of his moustache so menacingly sharp. For all his devotion to the proprieties, for all his exquisite discriminations and wounded reprehensions, for all his genuflections at the unsulliable altar of art, there was a seam of coarseness in his character to which, as she belatedly acknowledged, she should have paid closer heed. She was young when she first knew Gilbert Osmond, but she was not an innocent, she was not a hothouse bloom; she did not avert her gaze, or her consciousness, from the fundamental circumstances of being human, from the base and sad necessities that life imposes upon mortal creatures; she was a woman of her time, or perhaps of a better time that was still to come; yet for all that, she saw no reason to immerse herself willingly, indeed to revel, in suffocating mire, in darkness and dung. Her fiancé’s insistence that she should be made to descend into that long-disused cloacal den at the back of the old house was but one among several glimpses he had afforded her of what most likely he would claim to be a fearless candour, a frankness admirable and unflinching. But he was more than frank, he was more than candid: he took a malignant satisfaction in turning up the world’s stone so as to expose to the light of day the foul things swarming and squirming underneath it. That which was disgusting he savoured in the same way, it sometimes seemed to her, as he delighted in his possessions, as though the value of the latter were enhanced by the proximity of the former. As to herself, insofar as she was possessed by him, the reverse had been the case: his proximity had left her besmirched.