Mrs. Osmond Read online

  “Is something the matter?” Isabel asked. “You seem agitated—I hope you haven’t caught my illness.”

  “Oh, no, ma’am, no, I’m perfectly well. It’s only—” Her voice trailed off. She cut a stark figure there, looming in the glimmering candlelight, all elbows and bony shoulders and long sharp jaw, wringing her hands and still distressedly humming.

  “What is it?” Isabel gently urged. “Is there something you have to tell me? And please, sit, bring a chair, do. We’re quite alone. My aunt has retired for the night, we shall not hear from her before morning.”

  “It’s only, you see, ma’am,” Staines resumed, making no move to accept her mistress’s invitation to be seated, “I know you was out this morning to visit the master”—this was the mode by which she was accustomed to refer to Mr. Osmond—“and when you come back I could see you was upset.” She paused, twisting her fingers so hard she made the knuckles crack. “Forgive me, ma’am, being so forward and speaking to you like this,” she pleaded in a rush. “I wouldn’t for the world, only—”

  Again she paused on that word, “only,” as if it were a shibboleth she could not get past. Isabel rose, and taking up a candlestick led her companion to a big ugly marble table in the middle of the room, and there they both sat down, with the candle before them. “Come, my dear, speak,” Isabel said, in a soft and reassuring tone, though her heart shrank within her for cold foreboding.

  The tale that Staines had to tell was from long ago, and when it was told, Isabel wondered at herself that she had not fainted clean away during its telling. At first she had tried to dismiss it as the fanciful gossip of below-stairs, the kind of thing parlourmaids delighted in making up to shock each other and themselves. But, as Isabel reminded herself, servants knew everything, and did not have to invent; the things that were not said in front of them they always found out anyway, from behind, so to speak. How often had not she herself, as a child, heard her nurse tell the housekeeper, or the housekeeper tell her nurse, of the latest “scrape” her gaily improvident father had got himself into; of the creditors who had come barging to the door and been rebuffed; of the pretty young wives who had wavered into his path, and the outraged husbands who had littered that same path with gauntlets? Those tales too she had tried to disbelieve—how she had tried, squeezing her eyes shut to hold back the tears!—but in her heart she had known, beyond all denying, that they were true, at least in substance, if not in the suspiciously colourful detail in which they were related. Then, as now, what convinced her was the very dreadfulness of the thing, although her poor late father, for all that he was a rascal, would never have sunk to perpetrating an act of such wickedness an account of which the maid laid out before her mistress, there at the table, in the silent house, under a dome of darkness that not a high altar’s array of candles could have sufficiently illumined.

  There was some comfort for Isabel, though hardly more than a crumb of it, in the fact that the thing had been done in a time before Gilbert Osmond and Serena Merle could even have heard of her name—in a time, indeed, when she was hardly old enough to have had a name sufficiently established for anyone outside her diminished family and her few friends to care to take notice of at all. Osmond was living in Naples then, a youngish man with a young wife. The first Mrs. Osmond was a daughter of that city’s teeming aristocracy, although her family’s title dated no further back than Napoleon, and its fortune, reputedly founded on plunder from the Peninsular War—the lady’s grandfather had served as a marshal in the Grande Armée—had sunk in the rocky channel between the twin hazards of speculation and peculation, and hardly a penny of it remained. When Serena Merle came processing down the Campanian coast from Rome—in her morbid excitement Isabel saw her in a plunging chariot, a Brooklyn Valkyrie, blonde-braided and with a chained leopard by her side—she was already estranged from her husband, the Swiss gentleman of obscure origins whom she mentioned as seldom as decency would allow. She had immediately set her grey and calculating eye on the private scholar Gilbert Osmond, in the mistaken notion—it was a mistake for which the celebratedly shrewd lady was never to forgive herself—that this ornament of the expatriate American community in Naples was a figure not only of prodigious learning and exquisite taste but also of financial consequence. They met and, seeing the point of each other at once, they matched; what followed was, in the way of these things, inevitable, though less by the force of fate than the lady’s persuasive charm and unwavering single-mindedness.

  They were discreet, the lovers—they were discretion itself—but Nature, in her heedlessly bountiful fashion, can surprise even the most careful of couples. In due course it became necessary for Madame Merle to retreat into seclusion for a certain period, since her “interesting” condition, increasingly evident as it was, would have been difficult to account for, in light of the fact that Monsieur Merle had been nowhere in evidence during the months that had elapsed since his wife had first descended on the city under Vesuvius; in fact, the gentleman was in America at the time, pursuing a business project, which, like so many other of his speculative ventures, would prove not only fruitless but ruinously costly. The lovers looked about for a place the burgeoning mother-to-be might securely retire to, and fixed on the Salentine Peninsula as conveniently distant from Naples—not so far that the fugitive would be entirely out of touch, but safely beyond the furthest limit the frothing tide of gossip might be expected to lick at—and accommodation was sought for her, and found, in the pleasant city of Lecce, known to its inhabitants fondly as the Florence of the south, a conceit, we should add, which the ungenerous Florentines regard as at best a laughably fond delusion. In Lecce the lady occupied for the half year that remained of her term a compact but perfectly pleasant apartment in a fine old palazzo hard by the picturesque ruins of the Teatro Romano—Gilbert Osmond was acquainted with her landlord, a collector specialising in faience, a gentiluomo as fine, and seemingly almost as old, as the building itself, who had been given to believe that his tenant was Mr. Osmond’s spouse, and that her husband had sent her south to take the benefit of the bracing air of the peninsula and be delivered of her child amid peace and tranquillity such as Naples, in its habitual social tumult, could not be expected to provide.

  While Madame Merle was in exile, Mr. Osmond too absented himself for some months from his adopted city, when along with the first Mrs. Osmond he decamped to the obscure Piedmontese town of Alba, for reasons he did not consider it incumbent on him to share among his circle; however, by way of certain carefully placed hints, he left behind in Florence the suggestion that his family of two was presently to be swelled to three, with the addition of an infant Osmond. Alba was, and is, renowned for its truffles, its wine and its peaches, samples of all of which the couple no doubt enjoyed during their initially pleasant but, as it was to turn out, eventually tragic interlude in the remote north-west. Mrs. Osmond’s health had never been robust—her family on the maternal side had from time immemorial been subject to an inescapable and enervating malady of the blood—and it so happened that in Alba, and in the surrounding province of Cuneo in general, a fever of unprecedented virulence had for some time been rampant. It was to this cruel predator that Mrs. Osmond, defenceless by virtue of her inherited weakness, inevitably succumbed. Through painful days and tormented nights she fought for life, attended by her extravagantly distraught consort—it was said he did not leave her bedside for more than the briefest periods, never sleeping and eating hardly enough to sustain his own constitution—until in the end her invisible assailant proved the stronger, and the valiant lady, bathed in her husband’s extravagant tears, folded her hands upon her breast and consigned her soul to a better place. All Alba marked her passing—she had become known, with affectionate inaccuracy, as la signora inglese—and the bells of the Duomo tolled in mourning when her lifeless remains were placed in the funeral carriage preparatory to the long and doleful journey back to the city of her birth.

  This was the account of his wife’s demise tha
t Osmond had given to Isabel when the sad topic was first broached between them, on one of their strolls in the Boboli Gardens in the delightful early days of their engagement—or, rather, a version of this account, an elaborated sketch, let us say, delicately limned and lightly varnished, like one of Osmond’s own amateur exercises in the painterly art. He spoke of his bereavement as an occurrence in his life the memory of which he was honour bound to preserve and revere in public, but which for obvious reasons he did not care to dwell on over-much—his stoical cast of mind would allow of no morbid sentimentality or self-pity—especially at a time of joyful renewal, when his solitary state, which he had come to accept as permanent, was to be so unexpectedly and so happily transformed. Isabel had accorded equal respect to the fact of his loss and to the discreetly sealed vessel in which he had interred the memory of it, with the result that “the first Mrs. Osmond”—it might have been the title of a fashionable theatre piece of the day—was not mentioned again between the couple, not in the time of their happiness together or in the years that followed. It was with feelings of constraint, then, indeed of constriction, that the second Mrs. Osmond sat now in a crepuscular glow of candlelight and listened to her maid, of all people, resurrecting for her this tale of long-ago loss and consequent sorrow. The largest wonder of the thing was that Staines seemed on terms of such easy familiarity with the conspiracy that Osmond and Madame Merle had entered upon in order to keep hidden the conception and birth of their daughter. Of course, the maid had not related the sorry tale in the forms in which we have cast it here, but stumblingly, by way of evasions and awkward euphemisms; nevertheless she had been clear enough as to convey that she knew all there was to know, and further, that she had known it for a very long time. When Isabel asked why she had not spoken before now, the maid had fixed on her a stricken look and said, “Oh, ma’am, it never seemed my place to speak of such things!” But why then was she rehearsing it now? Did she believe her mistress to be ignorant of the dreary trick that Osmond and his lover had played in order to disguise Pansy’s origins? Isabel hoped it might be so, but it was a faint hope, and one that the maid’s demeanour and tone of voice did nothing to support. Since Staines knew all, and from the tale she told it was plain she did, then surely she knew that her mistress knew it also.

  The moment was, for Isabel, as difficult as it was delicate. How was she to behave, how was she to respond, sitting here while a menial drew back the bolts and opened before her the door to the farthest, final bloodied chamber wherein her husband had kept his secrets sealed? How, how could Staines imagine it appropriate now, if she had not thought it so before, that she should speak to her mistress of these terrible things? And if the creature knew so much, how much more might she know? Before this question Isabel’s heart quailed. All along, during these past weeks, there had lurked within her, kept as far down as she could make it go, the fearful notion that for all she had learned so far of the clandestine dealings between her husband and Madame Merle, there were further revelations still to come, further horrors that sooner or later she would be forced to face—was that moment now at hand? Thunder rumbled distantly; the noise was like that of an enraged child stamping about the floor in the far reaches of an upper room.

  Isabel drew herself upright, squaring her shoulders and clearing her throat. “For how long have you known these things, Elsie?” she asked, jolted a little to hear herself addressing the maid, without thinking, by her proper name.

  “Oh, from the start, ma’am,” the maid promptly replied.

  “But from which start?”

  “Well, from when we come here first, you and me along with you, all those years ago, from Gardencourt”—Staines had been released from service in the Touchett household, at Isabel’s request, to take up duty as her personal maid—“and the master, Mr. Osmond, began his courting of you. I got to know a maid that Mrs. Merle had here in Florence, Gabriella was her name, though I called her Gabby. She felt sorry for me, seeing as how I was all at sixes and sevens with everything being strange and me not knowing a word of the language. She had a bit of English, though, and she set herself to help me get the hang of things, with the tradesmen, and so on.” Here the maid paused, and looked down, with a wistful expression. “Poor Gabby,” she murmured, “she was such a nice, simple creature. She got in trouble—she had a boyfriend, unbeknownst to everyone, including me—and her mistress of course put her out of the house. I missed her something awful, when she was gone. Then, later, I heard she died, having the little one. Arturo, that was the boyfriend, he had left her by then, of course.” Again she was silent, then gave herself a shake and looked up at her mistress with apologetically rounded eyes. “It was Gabby who told me about the master’s wife, the first wife, that is, and as how she didn’t have a baby at all, before she died. You was aware of that, wasn’t you, ma’am?”

  “Yes, I was,” Isabel answered, lowering her own gaze to the table-top. “I know whose daughter Pansy is. I didn’t for a long time, until—until I was told, some weeks ago.”

  “Yes, and when the poor little thing was born, the master brought her with him to Florence when he come back from being in the north, giving it out that she was—well, that she was the child of his poor dead wife.” Once more she paused, and sat for a moment tensely regarding her mistress where she leaned before her with bowed head. “I suppose it was for the best,” she ventured then, “I mean, for the master to bring up Miss Pansy motherless. Well, when you consider—” But here her courage failed her, although both women knew what it was she had declined to offer for consideration, and for a long moment they sat in wordless and wondering contemplation of the notion of Serena Merle being called upon to observe her maternal duty in the nurturing of Gilbert Osmond’s daughter.

  Abruptly the rain came on again, in a rush and a gush, and soon was beating steadily upon the invisible garden.

  “I think I shall take my dinner now,” Isabel said, with a certain strained sternness, in the manner of a person marshalling her faculties in the wake of a cataclysm she had by some miracle survived. She had raised her head, only to witness the maid lowering hers. “Is there something more?” the mistress asked, with a renewed tremor. “Tell me, please, what it is.”

  The maid slowly lifted her eyes, with an expression of such anguish in them that Isabel thought to jump up from her chair and flee the room—the house, the city itself!—so as not to have to hear what she dreaded hearing but which she knew must be heard.

  “Oh, ma’am, it’s the worst thing,” Staines whispered, in a hush of horror, “the very worst.”

  “And that’s why you kept it until last,” Isabel said, with a cool collectedness she would not have thought herself capable of mustering.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the maid responded, “that’s why I kept it till last.”

  XXXIII

  On a distressingly hot day less than a week after that night of tempest and revelation in the garden room at the Palazzo Crescentini, Mrs. Osmond had herself delivered by coach to the central railway station at Santa Maria Novella, where she boarded the express train to Rome. She was travelling alone, and had brought with her no other baggage than a small valise, which the porter handed up to her, after he had assisted her in negotiating the steps to her compartment, and which she placed in the overhead rack, and took her seat. She did not expect her business in the Eternal City to detain her long, and planned indeed to return to Florence on the morrow. She was far more composed than she considered she had any right to be, given what Staines had told her in the garden room, while the thunder in its tantrums strode about the sky above the palazzo, shivering the candle-flames and causing the timbers of the vast old house to quake. Her calmness, her coldness, even, Isabel could only think to attribute to the relief she felt at having been delivered what was surely the last of a long series of blows out of the dark past. As she listened to the thing Staines had forced herself to tell her that night—after so long a silence!—she realised that it was something of just the sort as s
he had been waiting for. The jigsaw puzzle that the Countess Gemini had impatiently assembled and thrust before her shocked gaze had lacked a final piece, and now it was in place. She did not know how she could have been aware that there was a gap in the pattern, a blank space throbbing to be filled, but she had; a vacuum asserts itself by the simple force of its being void.

  In fact, that was precisely how she figured her own present state to be, a tense, expectant emptiness, a poised blankness immanent with potential. She seemed again as she had been long ago, in Albany, sitting quite still, with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for the world’s engine to start up and sound its whistle and plunge off with her amid smoke and flying sparks into the future. She knew this fancy for what it was, of course; she could not be as she once had been; the years could not be unwound, the damage they had wrought could not be undone. And yet, was there not a life to be lived, a destiny to be fulfilled? She had been tripped up and sent sprawling on to the iron rails, yet she had managed to scramble to some sort of safety; she had survived.

  Now the train, the actual train in which she was seated, set off with a sense of banners waving, of streamers flying. The heat in the compartment was great; Isabel hardly noticed it.

  She arrived in Rome at the luncheon hour, that interval of the day when the city briefly suspends its frantic clamour and subsides into a languorous yet somehow restless torpor. Outside the station she hailed a carriage and directed the driver to the Hotel d’Inghilterra. The winding streets, bisected down the middle by wedges of hard-edged purple shadow, held a sinister stillness, and the rattle of the horse’s hoofs struck ringing echoes from the walls of the shuttered houses on either side. The strong sunlight penetrated the sleeves of Isabel’s light gown and made her shiver—she noted, as she often had cause to, here in the south, that strange phenomenon whereby intense heat had some of the same effects upon the person as extreme cold—and she was glad when the carriage came to a jingling halt under the hotel’s taut blue-and-white awning. The marble-tiled lobby offered a balm of blessed dimness. She approached the desk and spoke a name to the concierge, who was tall and slim and silver-haired, and presented him with her card, which he held by one corner between a brown finger and a browner thumb while he scrutinised with an air of haughty interrogation the information printed upon it. “Sì, sì, la signora è nella sua stanza,” he said, with the merest shadow of a glacial smile. “Le dirò che sei arrivata—un momento.” He clicked his fingers, and a young man in a blue satin waistcoat popped up, like a jack out of its box, was spoken to in a rapid and confidential-sounding undertone, flashed a gleamingly ingratiating smile at L’ospite, took delivery of her card, and bore it away in the palm of a white-gloved hand. The concierge withdrew his attention from the lady before him with the blank briskness of one pinching out a candle flame, and set himself to shuffling, with all the appearances of intense concentration, through those mysterious flimsy sheets of paper that members of his guild have ever to hand just under the lip of their desks. Isabel turned away, smiling a little to herself over the perennial and covertly vindictive rituals of those tasked with attending to the public, and paced slowly about, stopping to examine idly a framed map of the city, or a fancifully romantic engraving of the ruins of the Capitol, or an assortment of potsherds, of doubtful vintage, distributed upon the shelves of a glass-fronted cabinet. Whence came these fusty adornments, she wondered, and by whose decision were they installed here, by what sustained directive diligently dusted and dutifully maintained? It sometimes seemed to her that the chief aim of all inanimate objects was to hold themselves in hiding in plain sight and thereby go safely unnoticed; it was her aim, too. She was aware now, although she had been trying for some time not to be, of her heart’s increasingly disquieted stirrings within its shrouded cage. She had a hard task ahead of her.