Mrs. Osmond Read online

  This interruption too Isabel chose to bypass, as if she had not heard it, and pressed on. “This week I summoned my lawyer, Mr. Pettigrew—he has his offices in Rome, but he kindly consented to come up to Florence personally to attend me.”

  “Oh, yes, the old scoundrel knows on which side his bread is buttered,” Osmond scoffingly observed. Isabel only shut her eyes against him, giving her head a quick little shake—she would not be deflected from her recitation, which she must finish and have done with before she could be gone.

  “I gave instructions that he should bring with him the deeds to the Palazzo Roccanera and all documents pertaining to its ownership.” She had opened her eyes, and now she turned them full upon her husband, lifting up her head in preparation for the delivery of a blow she knew full well would wound not him alone, but herself also. “I told you, Gilbert, when we spoke last week at Bellosguardo, that you might remain in residence there. It is your home, it’s where you have your life, and so it must continue. The basis of your occupancy will change, however.”

  Osmond too had put back his head, and was regarding her, at an angle, from under half-lowered lids. “The devil,” he exclaimed, “but if you haven’t sold the place out from under me!”

  “No, I have not,” Isabel responded. “But I have transferred the deeds out of my own hands.”

  “Transferred them? To whom? To Pansy? Tell me you gave the place to Pansy.”

  Isabel slowly shook her head. How calm she felt all at once, how calm and clear of mind, how serene of heart. She might have been standing atop the tallest peak of a serried range of mountains, looking into an immensity of blue and limitless sky.

  “Not to Pansy, no,” she said, “but to someone who was once as dear to you as she, or dearer.” She dropped her gaze and allowed it to settle upon Madame Merle. “You were mistaken to be suspicious of me,” she said, addressing this lady. “You shall have—you have—your place in Rome, as I promised.” She smiled, and nodded once, and turned aside to find her parasol—it was the same silly pink one she had inadvertently taken away with her after sharing her confidences with Henrietta Stackpole that day in Cavendish Square. She quickly found it, leaning against a bureau upon which she had set her hat and her gloves, and taking up all three of these articles now she moved towards the door. “Goodbye,” she said, in the most casual fashion imaginable. “I leave for London tonight.” On the threshold she paused, and glanced back into the room, at the man standing there, who had once been her husband, and the woman seated beside him, whom she had once thought her friend. The two were staring at each other, eye to eye—a quattr’occhi, as the Italians say, Isabel recalled with surpassing inconsequence—and in their looks were mixed so many meanings, emotions and calculations that it would be foolhardy to attempt to enumerate them here.

  XXXV

  Her faithful friend Miss Stackpole it was who next evening met Isabel on her arrival at the Charing Cross station. She had travelled via Turin and Paris, and the Channel crossing had been so sweetly calm that the sea, under a moonless sky, might have been a dark mirror on which an infinitesimally thin film of oil had been poured out. She had stood on deck for a long time, watching first the dim coastline of France recede, and then the glimmering cliffs of England growing near. She had the sense of her journey being far larger than it was, as if she were crossing not between countries but continents. Her forebears had been among the first to come out from the Old World to the New, and now she felt like one of them, gazing back with a detached sort of wistfulness, regretting that she had so few regrets, and looking forward in a balance between anxiety and hope. Hope: the word caught her up. Were there things she hoped for, any more? It seemed to her now that to be in a state of hopefulness for what was to come was in some way to hold in low esteem the things that were already here. What was the uncertain and beautiful future compared to the dear and dusty old palpable present? It was in the here and now that her life was to be lived; after all, were not the now and the here the shapers of what was to come?

  “So, you’ve left him!” were the first, grimly gratified, words Miss Stackpole thought to utter, after the two ladies had exchanged joyful greetings and embraces amid the smoke and smuts on the station platform. “I knew you would, in the end.”

  “Henrietta, my dear, you are incorrigible!” Isabel exclaimed, laughing, and then, with an exclamation of dismay, “Oh, look, Staines is going to fight with the porters again! Come, we must prevent it.”

  Peace was quickly restored, or imposed, rather, following the stern intervention of Isabel, and the judicious distribution among a covey of indignant stalwarts of the station staff of a certain number of sixpenny pieces, which Isabel, having nothing but French and Italian money in her purse, was compelled to borrow from Miss Stackpole, and at last the maid, with the baggage piled behind her on a commodious carriage, was dispatched to Pratt’s Hotel. When she was gone, and after an interval of nervous waiting to see if she might not come back—Staines had a strong inclination towards second thoughts—Isabel declared herself in urgent need of a restorative cup and a crumb or two of something sweet, and therefore she and Henrietta took themselves off to the station buffet, and there ordered a pot of tea and a plate of hot scones with butter and honey and marmalade. They were no sooner seated than Henrietta returned to the attack. “I suppose he was beastly to you, yes?” she said, with the undisguisably self-satisfied air of one who had “told you so.”

  “What a taste you have for the dramatic!” Isabel said good-humouredly. “There was no beastliness at all—you’ve met my husband, you know with what restraint and quietness he comports himself.”

  “But you have left him, I mean definitively?” Henrietta persisted.

  “You may mean definitively, but what does ‘definitively’ mean, in your lexicon?”

  “Why, that you told him your marriage, yours and his, was at an end!”

  The tea was brought then, the waiter’s ministrations providing, for Isabel, a welcome respite from her friend’s relentlessness. In the intervals when she was away from Henrietta she tended to forget the at times raucousness of her manner, the blank American way she had of saying out, “at the top of her voice,” things that more prudent souls would have hesitated to formulate even in thought, and would have made sure to mull over a long time before thinking to utter them aloud. What on earth did Mr. Bantling’s sister, Lady Pensil, make of the young woman who was soon to be her sister-in-law? Henrietta may have learned to use terms such as “beastly,” and how to butter a hot scone without making stains on the tablecloth, but surely her forthrightness would set the dovecotes a-flutter at Pensil Magna, and many another English establishment beside?

  “So are you going to disclose anything at all of what you have been about, in these past weeks?” Henrietta demanded now, in an aggrieved and petulant tone. “Or will your deplorable sense of discretion seal your lips for ever on the subject of your escape from bondage?”

  “Bondage!” Isabel breathed. “If that’s how you figure marriage to be, I wonder at your intention to enter that state of servitude and suffering yourself. How is Mr. Bantling, by the way?”

  “He’s very well,” her friend snapped back at her, “and don’t try to change the subject.”

  Isabel bent her face over her cup, to duck for a moment below the level of her friend’s fierce glare. The tea, in the proper English way, was as brown as winter bracken, and also had something of what she imagined would be the flavour of that hardy plant. She added two lumps of sugar to the brew, in the manner of a votary making an offering to her deity.

  “I stopped at Florence,” she said. “On the way to Rome, that is.”

  “What—then you didn’t see your husband at all?” Henrietta exclaimed.

  “No, no, he was there, at Bellosguardo, staying at his old quarters for the summer.”

  “And his daughter, where was she? Immured in some convent, I dare say.”

  Isabel sighed; she was weary after the journey, but she was
more than a little tired too of her friend’s seemingly endless haranguing. “As a matter of fact, Pansy is here, in England. Her father sent her to visit a titled acquaintance of his, at a castle somewhere—in Kent, I think.”

  Henrietta, blunt as she was, could on occasion be as sharp as a pin, and here her power of insight pierced straight to the heart of Osmond’s motive. “I presume the titled acquaintance has a son, or sons, of an eligible age,” she said, with a sort of sneering little laugh that Isabel found both irritating and faintly offensive. Her friend went on: “Your husband, I know, never got over the loss of Lord Warburton for a son-in-law.”

  Isabel quickly picked up her cup, and put it down again slowly. “You go too far,” she murmured.

  Here Henrietta immediately relented—the effect was somewhat like the sudden escape of all the air from a pneumatic tube—and reaching impulsively across the table she grasped her friend by the hand with a look of sorrow and remorse. “Forgive me, my dear,” she cried softly. “I know, I know, I go too far, and say too much. Poor Edward—Mr. Bantling—tries his best to curb my excesses, and steer me upon a politer path, with what success you see today. Will you forgive me?”

  “Of course, of course,” Isabel said, striving to mask her impatience, “of course I forgive you”—as I must always do, she did not add. “I went to Florence, I saw my husband, I told him there was no possible future for us together—and here I am!” She forced her face to show a bright smile. “What more is there for me to say? What more would you wish to know? It’s over. Factum est.”

  Henrietta released her friend’s hand and sat back on her chair and looked at her for a long moment, solemnly. “I’m glad,” she said at last. “The failure of a marriage is not a thing that would usually gladden me, but in this case, I confess it does. I grieve for you, in what must be your distress, but I’m happy for you too. You’re free.”

  “Yes, I’m free!” Isabel returned, her smile more bright, more brittle, more breakable than ever. She stood up. “And now I must go to the hotel. Staines will be fretting and, besides, I’m fatigued, and want my bed.”

  When they came out of the station Isabel was surprised to find the evening sky a dense gold glow—she always forgot, between one visit and the next, how long the twilight lasted up here in the north—and when her friend had left her, to attend a lecture on theosophy in High Holborn, she set off to stroll along the Strand, in the direction of Trafalgar Square. The setting sun dazzled her eyes, however, and she had gone only a little way when she was overcome by dizziness, and she turned back to the station and at the rank there requested one of the linkmen to call up a cab for her. Once she had ascended to the seat and settled herself she laid her head back and closed her eyes, hoping to lull her mind to rest, but in vain. Henrietta’s words—You are free, you are free—rolled over and over in her head, insistent and monotonous as the circular rhythm of the wheels of the hansom grinding on the roadway beneath her. She did not feel free; but then, she reflected, she really did not know how being free should feel. She supposed it would be a negative sensation, not a positive, a matter of not having rather than of having—of not having to strive, of not having to resist, of not having to guard one’s little corner, one’s bit of shelter; above all of not having to insist, against the will of others, on the sovereignty of one’s self. Once, long ago, she had thought, secretly, shamefacedly, that money would be a form of freedom, and the mover of her fate. She had soon come to see that only one part of this notion was the case: her fortune had sealed her fate, but in the process had made her the opposite of free.

  That night she slept but fitfully, and woke late, half in a daze, with the sun on her face. When she had bathed and put on the costume of light linen that Staines had laid out for her, she went down and breakfasted in silence and solitude, the other guests having long since been and gone about their morning affairs. She had ordered a second cup of coffee when Mr. Pratt himself, the proprietor of the inn, as rotund and affable as ever, came to inform her that there was a visitor—indeed, two visitors—waiting on her in the parlour. She cancelled the supplementary cup and rose quickly and left the breakfast room, curious to know, and conscious of an unaccountable faint foreboding, who it was that should be calling upon her at ten-thirty of the clock on a sleepy London weekday morn. On entering the parlour she caught herself up momentarily at the sight of what, in her initial confusion of mind, she took to be Madame Merle’s unmistakably straight and handsome back confronting her through the narrow slats of a small gilt chair set beside the fireplace. She was still staring when a second lady, standing in the bay of one of the windows that looked out on Dover Street, turned about swiftly and revealed herself to be the Countess Gemini.

  “Aha, you thought to avoid us, did you?” this lady demanded, with a roguish brightness. “But see, we have tracked you to your lair!”

  Now the seated person turned also, but even before she had done so Isabel had realised her mistake: it was not Madame Merle, but her daughter; it was Pansy, in all the pale reality of herself.

  “I was not aware of being in hiding, from you or anyone else,” Isabel said to her sister-in-law, with a smile, “and I’m very glad that you have found me out—though I should not think so public a place as Pratt’s Hotel could be described as a lair.” She transferred her gaze to Pansy, on whom it lighted with an instant softening. “My dear, how well you look, and—and how fine!”

  It was not, in fact, the fineness, or the wellness, of her aspect that seemed to Isabel worthy of remark, but the change that had come over her, a change far more momentous than might have been expected to occur in the short time since Isabel had last seen her, at the convent of the Sacro Cuore di Gèsu in Florence. Then, she had been a girl of twenty: now she was a woman of twenty-one. It was not that she was so very much altered as to appearance, although her face, even in the short time that had elapsed since Isabel had looked upon her step-daughter, had lengthened, and her shoulders, in particular, had broadened; but there was about her a new air of determination, of self-possession, of—and here Isabel faltered, wishing to stop herself on the brink of the word—of a new hardness. She greeted her step-mother with a curt “Buon giorno,” and then, remembering where she was, changed, off-handedly, to an even cooler “Good day.” Isabel, all at once overcome by a kind of happy anguish, went forward swiftly and took the girl—the woman!—in her arms and drew her almost passionately to her breast. Pansy suffered the embrace stiffly, then disengaged herself and stepped back, at which Isabel let her arms drop to her sides, and knew herself, in that instant, to have been abandoned.

  “I thought,” she said falteringly, addressing both Pansy and the countess, “I thought you were in—in Kent, was it?”

  “Oh, we were, yes,” the countess said dismissively. “At Fernley Hall, the home, or seat, I suppose I should say, of Lord Lanchester and his numerous sons—numerous, and dull. The entire place was the very definition of dullness, wasn’t it, Pansy?” Pansy’s only reply was the merest shrug, and the countess turned her attention to Isabel again. “We have been to other places too, of course. There was Fawns, an enormous and perfectly hideous mansion owned by that very rich American—what’s his name? I’ve forgotten it—an acquaintance of Lanchester’s, on whom his lordship pawned us off—you needn’t look at me like that, Pansy, the folk at Fernley couldn’t wait to see the back of us—and when our welcome there ran out, we had no choice but to seek refuge at Gardencourt—yes, my dear Isabel, Gardencourt—which was not at all what I expected, having heard so much about the place—very dreary, and with bathrooms that even an Italian would balk at—although there was the one bright spot, which was the absence of Mrs. Touchett—they say she will not return to England, and intends to put Gardencourt on the market. It was while we were there, at Gardencourt, I mean, that Osmond telegraphed to say he would sustain us here no longer, and that we must return at once to Florence—he’s vexed at me for having failed in the mission he had tasked me with”—she directed her eye me
aningfully in Pansy’s direction—“so here we are, filling in the time as best we can before taking the train to Paris this evening—to Paris, and then onwards, to”—she grimaced—“ ‘home’!”

  Isabel had attended patiently to this account—which in the telling was far more extensive and richly detailed than the version of it we have provided here—and now enquired how the pair had known that she was in London, and here at Pratt’s.

  “Mrs. Touchett sent one of her famous telegrams to me to Gardencourt—I have it, look.”

  She produced a small green envelope and extracted the scrap of telegraph paper from it, upon which was printed the terse directive:

  My niece at Pratt’s stop take yours to visit her there stop Lydia Touchett

  “Ah, yes,” Isabel said, smiling and nodding, “that is the true stamp of my aunt. I’m glad she wrote to you; and I’m glad”—she looked at Pansy—“oh, I’m so glad you came!”

  She bethought herself then to offer refreshments to the pair. The countess declared that she “would kill” for a glass of champagne, despite the unseemly earliness of the hour—“In England the best one can hope for is a thimbleful of sticky sherry as one is about to sit down to dinner!”—but added that Pansy wished to pay a last visit to the shops in the Burlington Arcade.

  “Oh, Pansy dear, must you go?” Isabel exclaimed. “I should so like to hear your impressions of England, and—and how you found the English.” She smiled apologetically for the lame manner in which she had couched her entreaty; she had turned a little aside from the countess and her avid eye. “Remember what you said to me, what you asked of me, the last time we spoke, at the convent?” Pansy stood impassive, with her hands folded before her, and said nothing. “You asked me,” Isabel went on, “to promise to come back to you. Do you recall the moment—do you recall saying it, ‘Tell me you will come back’?”