Mrs. Osmond Page 26

  “You’re right, of course, I wasn’t clear in what I wrote to you,” she said, managing a smile she judged as audacious as his own. “I did not intend to be clear. I wished to leave you to speculate and guess.”

  In response to this he produced a large and passably convincing laugh, the ring of which had a crack in it, though, to match his eyes’ faint flicker of disquiet; it was apparent he did not like the daring of her smile, and even less the tenor of her tone, which bordered on the bantering.

  “All the same, I suspect you are being disingenuous,” he said pleasantly. “I’m sure it did not take much trying for you to make, in your letter, a muddle of your meaning.”

  This she let pass; his insults were least effective when most openly delivered; he might be many things, but he had not in him the makings of a mere brute. He was never less than subtle, and subtly persuasive, as she remembered from the early days of his courtship of her. She rose from her chair now and went and stood in the effulgent doorway, not for the sake of looking at the garden’s glorious riot—the noun, if not the adjective, was her Aunt Lydia’s—but of not looking at her husband. She was a little like, she thought, the executioner who places the hood over the condemned man’s head, to spare not his victim but himself a dreadful sight. She was about to subject to surely the worst hour of his life a person whom she had once thought the most honourable, the most admirable, the most beautiful of men. On the Day of Defiance, as in Biblical terms, not wholly ironic, she figured it to herself, the day when, in the face of the gravest warning her husband had ever yet laid upon her, she had left the house they shared together and flown to England and to Gardencourt and her dying cousin, she had experienced her intensest moment of weakness and wavering when Osmond, palely palpitant with the force of his conviction, had declared her to be committing a shameless and scandalous breach of the rules of right behaviour, those rules by which he, and she, too, or so he had thought until now, had determined life should, and could only in any decency, be lived. He did not seek to deny the pass their union had come to—there were depths of hypocrisy to which even he would not descend—or to pretend the damage done to it could be mended. But they had contracted to a marriage, and marriage was much, so he averred, was more even than the sum of their mutual unhappiness combined, and not a thing to be capriciously ducked out of. Yes, they had suffered, and were suffering, and likely would continue to suffer—but that which cannot be cured must be endured, and courageously and uncomplainingly accepted. For it was imperative, he declared, to accept the consequences of our actions, even those in which we were grotesquely mistaken, for by that only—and here he grew paler and intenser still—only by that are we to value the most valuable of all we possess, which is the honour of a thing. In that moment, as she listened to him and looked at him, herself pale and trembling, she had caught again a flash of that magnificence, that splendour of spirit, which she had originally discerned in him, and which had made him seem the worthiest object of her love that she had yet encountered. And even when, not five minutes later, as she was making her blundering way out of the house, too choked for tears, and Osmond’s sister had drawn her aside and “told her all,” as the forgers of melodramas like to phrase it, something still lingered of the magnificent glow she had just now glimpsed in her husband’s passionate avowals. What, after all, she asked herself, had those two done between them, her husband and Madame Merle? They had secured for the former the means of living the moneyed life he felt to be his due—the matter of his having to marry a wife in the process would have been the least of it—and for the latter the assurance that her daughter should “have something” and so be made to seem if only a little bit more eligible to some prowling but impecunious prétendant, preferably one possessed of a title. The acknowledgement of the mundanity of the couple’s crimes had been not the least of the factors in her deciding to return to Italy. And had she now the right to play the avenging angel, and with the flaming sword of her self-righteousness drive the unhappy pair of sinners, not naked into the fallen world, but all too suitably apparelled into a hell that was largely of their own devising? So moved was she by the contrary and revisionist logic of the rigorous if brief examination of conscience she had just performed that she was on the point of whirling about, with a muffled moan, to face her husband and pour out to him an inarticulate jumble of contrition, justification and denial, and was prevented only by his speaking first.

  “By the by,” he said, with exasperated levity, “what I am impatient to hear, indeed I hardly know why I haven’t yet shaken it out of you, is what you did with that tremendous cache of our money—our money—that you extracted from the bank in London and took away with you.”

  XXIX

  The bank had written to him, of course—that was only to have been expected—first by way of a flustered terse telegram, and then in a very much more extensive and painstakingly circumlocutory letter. It was indeed a very large and, to a banker, frighteningly ill-secured sum that Mrs. Osmond had withdrawn; as such it should not have been difficult to keep track of, had it been directed along the usual channels. Discreet enquiries had been circulated among the financial fraternity—one might think it unlikely that such a collaborative alliance could exist, in so uncompromisingly competitive a market, yet it does, it does—but no such commensurately considerable a sum had been deposited at any of the city’s, indeed of the country’s, changing-houses, and certainly not in a common leather satchel, by the hand of an unescorted lady. In the closing paragraph of his letter, Mr. Grimes—or perhaps Mr. Goresby: Osmond had not bothered to note the name of the signatory—had permitted himself cautiously, and so lightly as to have seemed to be hovering in upper airs, to enquire if Mr. Osmond could say as to what possible purpose or purposes Mrs. Osmond might have put the amount in question. The banker duly noted the trite little story Isabel had artlessly spun for him about the urgent requirement of funds for the purchase of a house, but he had discounted it even as it was in the course of being elaborated. Then, at the very close of the missive, there had come an inspissatedly expressed and barely scrutable conjecture, which Osmond, having succeeded in cracking the code of it, had at once taken up. “The fellow assumes you are being blackmailed; I’m rather inclined to think him not mistaken.”

  Isabel drew in a long deep painful breath. Her abstracted gaze, directed through the doorway at the garden, had at that moment settled upon a rose, the biggest blossom on a bush that sprawled in a twined and knotted confusion of gnarled limbs and crowding leafage against the base of the mossy parapet opposite, and now the thing seemed to transform itself before her eyes, as had her hand a little while past when it lay before her on the table, so that it seemed no longer a flower but a cluster of bulging crimson tongues stuck out at her in obscene mockery. She turned away hurriedly, and faced back into the room. Her husband had returned to the sofa with his glass of wine, and was stretched there at his ease, propped again upon an elbow.

  “Ah, Gilbert,” she exclaimed, in a sort of stricken gasp, “to think that I once thought you had so fine a mind!”

  “While I thought you, if nothing else, were to be trusted.”

  “ ‘If nothing else’?”

  “What else is there to a marriage if not trust?”

  He sighed, and put aside his glass and drew himself up to a seated position and leaned forward, placing his feet wide apart on the stone-flagged floor and setting his hands on his knees, looking a little askance with his head inclined as if he were listening for some far signal; it was an unselfconsciously characteristic pose, and seeing him there, in his well-cut coat and his pipe-clayed narrow summer shoes, with the ribbon of some order or other pinned to his lapel, she almost pitied him, not in anticipation of the hurt she had come here to inflict on him, but for what he was, a spiteful, disappointed man, lost in the arrogance of his delusions. He was silent for a long while, reflecting and calculating. Then, without turning his head, he looked at her sideways with narrowed eyes, and spoke. “Tell me, madam,
what am I to think? I issued you a warning, the day of our last interview, but you cast it back in my face defiantly, indeed insultingly, and departed my house—”

  “Your house?” Isabel boldly interjected.

  “You left and travelled to England against my express wish and best advice,” her husband pressed on, his voice sinking in timbre but intensifying in force. “Even after your cousin’s much-heralded and wearingly long-delayed death, you stayed away for—what is it now, two months?—without a word of explanation or excuse; the next I hear of you is a cry of alarm from the bank, and news of a terrifyingly large and unaccountable withdrawal of cash; then at last you send a letter, on the notepaper of a shady Paris hotel, written in your usual quaint approximation of the English language, conveying a mixture of vague threats and impenetrably phrased propositions regarding, among other matters, my daughter. And now here you are, with a light in your eye and a menace in your step such that, were I of a less settled disposition and you a more formidable opponent, would have me positively quaking in my boots. Therefore I ask again: What am I to think?”

  “I do not oppose you,” Isabel wearily objected. She had returned to sit once more by the table, which by now had taken on for her the impersonal but sustaining solidity of some humbly living thing, a venerable donkey, say, or a dependable dog.

  “You do, madam, you do oppose me. From the very start of our marriage the spirit of opposition has informed your every action. Do you dare deny it?”

  She shook her head, not, indeed, in denial of the charge, but as a sign of fatigue, and a jaded refusal to engage in the dispute he was attempting to foment; she would argue with him no more. She looked about the room; its denuded and diminished aspect struck her as sadly expressive of the essence of the occasion, when the split and swaying edifice of their marriage was being finally dismantled, like a condemned building.

  “Why did you hate him so?” she asked, her melancholy gaze still roving the room.

  Her husband now turned full to face her. “What?” he demanded.

  “My cousin—why did you hate him? You always did.”

  “You are mistaken; there wasn’t man enough there for me to hate.”

  “How base, to speak so of the dead,” she quietly protested.

  “What—should I dissemble because the fellow finally attained that state he had been aimed towards throughout his pitiable excuse for a life? Do you expect me to sigh and sympathise and sound a mourning note? There would be baseness for you!”

  She drew her face aside quickly with a grimace, as if he had struck her and she were avoiding a further blow. She had once proudly declared, to whom exactly she could not now recall—it must have been Lord Warburton, or Caspar Goodwood, she supposed: it hardly mattered which—her readiness to be unhappy and to suffer pain, if that was to be the cost of living her life to the fullest. The thought, when she revisited it in memory now, seemed a whistling past the graveyard in which the corpse of her defeated self was laid. What to Osmond had seemed her wilful and capricious opposition to him was in fact a necessary assertion of her independent self; he had sought to kill off in her all ideas that ran counter to his conception of the right order of things; her mind must be made dull, must be neutralised, in order that his own opinions and pronouncements should shine out all the more brilliantly. Caspar Goodwood had been scandalised by what he saw as her pledging of allegiance to Europe by “marrying into it”—possibly he comforted himself for the loss of her by holding to account an entire continent, conveniently overlooking the fact that the man she had married was, at least originally, an American—yet deny it as she might, there was a bitter place in her heart where she part-way agreed with him. As we have already noted, that she had been betrayed by Americans long resident in Europe made it seem that Europe had connived in her betrayal, as if the place had prepared her downfall in advance. In entertaining such a thought she was, she knew, being every bit as unreasonable on the subject as Caspar Goodwood—more so, perhaps. She had long ago acknowledged that Europe had been her fate from the moment her Aunt Lydia lit on her that day in Albany. When she looked back now the road behind her was as smooth and straight as it had seemed it would be when it was still before her; Fate, she had come painfully to realise, allows of no deviations, but carries us inexorably forward, blinkered, between the traces.

  Her husband had risen from the sofa and, after another vain patting of his pockets, was rummaging irritably here and there in search of a cigar; finding none, he poured himself another glass of wine—his not offering her a glass, Isabel realised, was a measure less of rudeness than of his discomposure. He set himself to stand before the fireplace, which was as tall as he, with his wine in one hand and the other braced at his back, and looked down upon his wife with frank displeasure. “Are you going to tell me what you did with the money?” he demanded. “I apologise for the crudeness of the question, but your inscrutability in the matter leaves me no choice other than blunt directness.”

  “I put it to a good purpose,” she replied, in a placid tone she knew would increase his annoyance; it was a thing she could not help.

  “And may we know the nature of this purpose? Did that dry stick from Boston whom you nearly married, the stern-faced Mr. Goodwood, discover a hole in his fortunes that required filling? Or perhaps you laid an injudicious wager on one of Lord Warburton’s racehorses—though I grant you that could hardly be considered a good cause. Please tell me you did not give it to some home for stray cats and dogs—for I know you to be capable of any folly that will warm your Puritan heart.”

  She met his angry baiting with a long and level look. “Question me no further,” she said calmly. “I’ve told you the purpose was good, and you must content yourself with that.”

  He took what amounted almost to a gulp from his glass, violently; his hand, she did not fail to notice, was not entirely steady.

  “What would content me,” he said, in a voice so restrainedly soft as to be almost a purr, “is that you should say you have the money safely kept somewhere, and intend to return it, sooner rather than later, to its rightful place deep in the vaults of Messrs. Touchett and Teddington.” He waited, staring steadily. “You can give me no such assurance? Then the flames of my suspicions flare up again, more fiercely than ever. I believe you had no intention of informing me of your extraordinary deed, not realising the bank would write to me—though how could you think they wouldn’t?—and therefore I assume the worst. And no, please, do not insult me with more talk of good works and pious donations.” Again he waited for her to speak, again in vain. He shook his head, and tapped the toe of his right shoe rapidly three times on the hearthstone, an action that, by seeming merely petulant, was all the more revealing of his anger. “I believe you to have a lover,” he said, with unrestrained directness. “Or that you did have. This is why you stayed away so long. I believe you threw him over, or injured him in some way; that he threatened to betray you in public; and that you needed the money to—what do they say?—to pay him off.”

  “Gilbert, Gilbert,” his wife murmured, closing her eyes against him. “Please stop, I beg you. You disgrace yourself, and when you’re cool again you will regret your words.”

  What shocked her most was not the wildness of the allegations he was flinging at her, like so many handfuls of dripping filth, but the shabby indecency of the thing. The man before her, trembling with the force of a barely suppressible rage, was a person she hardly recognised. Where was that delicacy of judgement, that subtle balance of tone, that graceful restraint, which were among the qualities she had loved him for? It was almost a physical pain to her to see him fall so far below his own standards. Now he swung about on his heel and set to pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace with a tense, tight tread, gesturing with his nearly emptied glass.

  “Or perhaps it is something more subtle, and even more sensational.” He gave her a brief, a sort of sliding, glance, showing the sharp tip of a tooth; she had the sense of him as an animal, ruffled
and raging, pent in a narrow cage. “Those scribbles it pleases your friend Miss Stackpole to call her ‘writings’ hardly attain the Sapphic heights, but perhaps there are other ways in which her inclinations point in the direction of Lesbos. Has she seduced you into her cénacle, and demanded a mighty entrance fee?”

  Isabel sprang to her feet. “For shame!” she cried, and stood swaying, her fingertips pressed to the table-top to steady herself. “Is there nothing so foul you will not say it?” She faltered, and lifted a hand to her brow; when she spoke again her voice was strained and faint. “I feel I have not known you before now. You delight in what is nasty, and call it sophistication.”

  “Oh, yes, and you are so pure,” he returned, with biting scorn. He had ceased to pace, and stood confronting her again with his back to the fireplace. “Your money, you imagine, buys you sanctity. But did you ever pause to ask yourself where it came from, this famous fortune of yours? You will say your uncle willed it to you, at the urging of that fool of a son of his, who was so laughably in love with you. But where did old Touchett have it from? The bank, yes, of course. And how did it come to be in the bank, so much of it, all those mounds and mounds of gleaming gold? Do you think it floated down like manna from above to fill the vaults of Touchett and Teddington? No, my dear wife, it did not fall from Heaven: it was hard won, and hard fought for, and much innocent blood was spilled in the getting of it. The bank was set up on your aunt’s inheritance of her father’s railroad fortune. The railroad—ah. Think of the hundreds, the thousands, of Chinese coolies whose backs were broken in the laying down of those relentless tracks; think of the labourers who fled from famine in Ireland only to die of malnutrition in the sweltering western deserts; think of the tribes of Redskins who were slaughtered, their lands stolen, to make way for the iron road. You think your fortune pure? Your money is filthy, like all lucre. The bank is that very temple from which Christ drove the money-lenders with a scourge.”