Mrs. Osmond Page 33

  “Yes, I remember,” Pansy said, in her new sharp cool manner. “But you didn’t, did you? You didn’t come back.”

  At these words Isabel had the sensation of some spurned thing inside her spreading wide its wings and launching itself sorrowfully into the desolation of the sky.

  “Well, well, we all make promises and break them,” the countess said briskly, with a glance towards Isabel that was not entirely lacking in sympathy. Then she turned to Pansy. “You should run along now and visit your shops, before the noonday crowds come in.” She peered into her purse and drew out a sovereign. “Here is a little money to spend—it’s all I have.”

  Pansy took the proffered coin with an air of indifference, and made to leave, ignoring the look of anguished imploring that Isabel bent upon her. At the door the young woman paused, and turned, and gazed a moment, through half-closed eyes, at the step-mother she was in the act so pointedly of spurning for ever. “And Papa,” she said, “have you forsaken him, also?” And then, not deigning to await a reply, she was gone.

  Isabel crossed swiftly to the window, and stood there, pressing a knuckle hard against her mouth and peering down into the street in hope, a hope that was to prove vain, of catching what she feared would be the last sight of her step-daughter. The countess, behind her, looked on, somewhat impatiently, with eyebrows sceptically lifted. Usually she was much diverted when one person was awful to another, thinking of the so many times when people had been awful to her; all the same, she could not but feel a little sorry for Isabel, who when it came to the conduct of life was really very stupid, for all her much-vaunted cleverness in matters of the mind. “Don’t be affected by her cutting tongue,” she said. “This is how she is, now.”

  “But she’s so much changed!” Isabel, still facing the window, as good as wailed. “She’s so like—”

  “Her father? Yes, and her mother, too.”

  “But she was so gentle, so sweet!” She turned, and when she spoke again her voice was sharper, with the sharpness of an accusation. “What happened to her?”

  The countess returned her an indignant stare. “I hope you do not mean to blame me?” she challenged. “What she has become is all her own work—hers, and her parents’. None of us can escape what we inherit, not even you.”

  Isabel, too shaken to bother questioning that last sally, walked across the room to the fireplace and stood gazing emptily into the empty grate. “Her father sent you with her here to make a match for her. He will not be pleased that you have failed him.”

  “Failed him? Ha! Osmond doesn’t know this country and, more than that, he doesn’t know his daughter. He thought to marry her, without mention of a dot to help her, into one of the great houses of England, imagining it would be he who does a favour to the realm by enriching it with the gift of a child of his. But he was wrong in every way possible. I can tell you, if one of Lord Lanchester’s doltish sons had set his eye on her, he would have needed to be of a nature more complaisant than even the usual run of Englishmen.”

  “Complaisant?” Isabel asked, her distracted attention caught by the word. “What do you mean?”

  The countess, with a sort of flounce of impatience, threw a quick glance towards the ceiling, then fixed again upon her sister-in-law.

  “Don’t you understand anything?” she asked, simply and slowly, as if addressing a child. “Don’t you see anything? You should never have allowed that brute of a brother of mine to send the child to a convent.”

  “Why not?”

  The countess gave an exasperated groan. “My dear, everyone knows what those places are like, and what goes on in them.”

  Isabel had turned her head and was staring at her with a frown of baffled interrogation. “What do you mean?” she demanded weakly. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Again the countess turned her eyes heavenwards a moment, then shook her head and sighed. Isabel, although she had a good two or three inches in height on her sister-in-law, had the strong impression of being looked down upon.

  “That creature would never have found a husband,” the countess said, “for the very reason that a husband was the last thing she wanted.”

  “But Mr. Rosier,” Isabel murmured, “she wanted him.”

  “Mr. Rosier?” the countess scoffed. “Oh, I grant you she may have wanted him, in some sort of way, but only for the reason that there was not enough of a man in him to be—well, to be a man.” She stepped forward quickly and set both of her hands on the half-dazed woman’s shoulders. “Don’t you see, my dear,” she said with unwonted softness, “don’t you see how it is with her? It will most likely pass, in time—you know what young women are—but for now it is not men she cares for, not men at all!”

  Isabel nodded, with the affectless regularity of a clockwork figure. She saw; she saw.

  XXXVI

  She had herself a visit to make this day, and the prospect of it had been much on her mind, although the events of the morning, which we have just related, had diverted her temporarily from any thought of it. After the Countess Gemini had left, however—Pansy had not returned from her excursion to the brilliant and bounteous Arcade, so her aunt had felt obliged to go in search of her, saying with high sarcasm that Osmond should never forgive her if she were to lose his daughter entirely—she got herself ready, a matter merely of putting on her hat and making sure she had British silver in her purse, and requested the hotel doorman to summon her a cab. The day had turned cloudy, though it was horridly hot, and the air had a dullish grey gleam to it, like the bloom on tarnished pewter, and the leaves hung listless on the trees in Green Park. Isabel paid only the vaguest heed to these meteorological effects; she was thinking of Pansy. Was the Countess Gemini correct in accusing her of having misjudged her step-daughter all along? Had the sweet and docile child she had thought she knew been not docile or sweet at all, but a dissembling little schemer quietly and craftily biding her time until the opportunity should come when she might kick over the traces and be her true self? It was not to be credited, really it was not. The suspicion the countess had imputed to Isabel, namely that Isabel considered it was the aunt’s frivolous and irresponsible influence that had produced, in a matter of weeks, such a startling transformation in the girl, was not a suspicion at all, but a conviction. The countess had chided her for allowing her husband to put Pansy in a convent, but what, she might ask, had Osmond been thinking of to put his daughter into the care of his sister, of all people? Had he wished her to be made hard and careless and cruel? Throughout the child’s life, until now, he had been unrelenting, to the point of tyranny, in his determination that she should be sealed off from the world and its ways; under his despotic authority she had known little else but cloisters and choirs. When she had reached an age at which it was natural for her to leave the convent, he had promptly enclosed her within the further confines of his steely vigilance, meaning to keep her there until he should judge the moment opportune, and the chosen candidate of the highest suitability and worth—suitable and worthy by his lights—to marry her off. Lord Warburton had been his ideal, his very dream of a son-in-law, but Warburton had prudently withdrawn when it was made clear to him that Pansy’s affections had been bestowed elsewhere, on poor Ned Rosier—Isabel could never think of Mr. Rosier, even now, without that pitying epithet attached to his name—at which point Osmond had sentenced the girl to another term of corrective custody at the house of the holy sisters. And then, all at once, astonishingly, shockingly, the years of drilling and disciplining had been set at naught, and Osmond’s daughter had been packed off under the care, if that was what to call it, of her notorious aunt, to rattle around the stately homes of England in search of a husband, any husband, with any sort of title at all. Had the countess disclosed to Osmond, as she had just a little while ago disclosed to Isabel, her conviction as to Pansy’s true and secret nature, with the result that he had ordered her to take his daughter to England and find a match for her, on the assumption that no one there would d
ream such a thing could be true of such a young lady—Osmond, as Isabel knew, had a low opinion of the perspicacity of the Anglo-Saxon sensibility—or that even if the truth about Pansy’s predilections were to be recognised, no one among that neutral and neurasthenic race would care a fig in the matter?

  And now what was to happen? Pansy was returning to Florence husbandless; would she live with her mother? Would she live with her parents? Would they make the semblance of a family together? Impossible, surely. How should Gilbert Osmond, that paragon of proper appearance, that fanatic of convention, how should he display before society’s gloating eye the living evidence of his past sins and present insupportable predicament? No, it could not be. Yet Pansy must live somewhere, she must have a home. Isabel looked back now, with a kind of detached self-sympathy, at the pathos of her plan, which that morning had been so definitively dashed, of being Pansy’s provider and protector, of being her saviour and nothing less.

  What if the countess should take the young woman under her once colourful and now decidedly dusty wing? This, however, was a thought far beyond Isabel’s sustaining.

  Her sister-in-law was the one confidante, if that was what she was, to whom Isabel had disclosed the fact of her having given over sole possession of the Palazzo Roccanera into the hands of Serena Merle. Why she had not told it to anyone else, to her friend Miss Stackpole, for instance, she was not quite sure, except of course that she knew Miss Stackpole would have informed her flat-out that she was a hopeless fool, and disgracefully irresponsible to boot, while others, had there been others to tell, would simply have laughed at her. The countess, who if not clever was certainly worldly-wise, had seen to the heart of Isabel’s motives more quickly and more clearly than had Isabel herself.

  “They are two condemned souls,” she had said, “Osmond and the Merle woman, and you have devised a hell for them to torment each other in! Why, you cunning thing—who’d have thought it of you?”

  “If they are condemned, then it’s their own work,” Isabel had protested, but the countess was not listening, engrossed as she was in contemplating the gratifyingly entangled implications of the thing that Isabel had brought about.

  “I must say, my dear, it’s an expensive revenge you have exacted. But you can afford it, and I imagine the palazzo is a poisoned place for you, now. She’ll sell it, of course, and he’ll be put out on the street. He may even be compelled to come to me for shelter.” And she had given one of her gay little shrieks of laughter. “I shall enjoy that.”

  Now Isabel was jogged out of her disquieted reverie as the cab came to a stop at the neat little house in Cedar Street. The hollyhocks in the scrap of front garden were in full bloom, while the lilac trees had lost their lustre, but otherwise everything was as she remembered, including the faint rank smell coming up from the river. Her tug at the doorbell-rope produced no sound from within, yet after but a moment Daisy the maid appeared, cheerful and charming as ever. She greeted the visitor warmly, in a low voice, and explained that the bell had been muffled so as not to disturb the lady of the house. “She sleeps a great deal,” the maid confided, “and as a matter of fact is resting now. But Mr. Devenish is here.”

  Isabel was shown into the sunny dining room, where indeed she found the said Mr. Devenish, he of the green eyes and russet hair, who put aside the journal he had been perusing and scrambled up from the stern little armchair where he had been awkwardly perched—the house, as Isabel knew, had not much to offer in the way of creature comforts—and came forward, smiling, with a hand extended.

  “Mrs. Osmond, how delightful to see you!”

  Daisy was relieving Isabel of her straw hat and Miss Stackpole’s enduring pink parasol—at the latter of which Mr. Devenish had cast a quizzical glance—and now she enquired if the lady and gentleman might care for some refreshment. “A glass of elderberry cordial, perhaps?” she asked of Isabel, with a discreet but definite twinkle, a reference no doubt to the daunting fare on offer when Isabel last visited, and the fortitude with which she had faced it.

  “Perhaps some tea?” Isabel ventured.

  When the girl had departed, Mr. Devenish and Mrs. Osmond stood smiling somewhat helplessly into each other’s faces, until Mr. Devenish at last, stammering a little, suggested that they might be seated, and went to the deal table in the middle of the floor and drew out a chair for the lady. They sat. They smiled at each other again. Mr. Devenish fidgeted with his hands. His eyes were of a truly remarkable shade of green, flinty and transparent, just like the sea, Isabel thought, on certain crisp sunny days in spring.

  “Tell me how Miss Janeway is,” she said now, dispensing with her smile, which had become altogether too strained and awkward to sustain.

  “Very poorly, I’m afraid,” Mr. Devenish replied, and he too assumed a grave look. “She keeps to her bed, and manages to get down for no more than an hour or so, usually in the evenings.”

  “As bad as that?”

  “As bad as that. I fear the end cannot be far off. The doctors—” He lifted his hands from the table and let them fall back, in a gesture of sad helplessness.

  Daisy the maid came then with their tea on a silver tray, along with a plate of arrowroot biscuits. The girl’s good humour was so artless and unfailingly infectious that Isabel felt cheered just to look at her.

  “Perhaps I could come back, this evening,” Isabel said, when the maid had gone. “Do you think that might be possible? I should so like to talk to your aunt, before—” She left the phrase unfinished.

  “You could stay now,” Mr. Devenish replied, and immediately blushed—he was of that race of red-haired folk who colour easily. “I mean, you could stay until my aunt has finished her rest.”

  Isabel smiled over the rim of her teacup. “That might be quite a long time, if Miss Janeway is as weak as you say she is.”

  “Well, then, we might”—Mr. Devenish eagerly began, but then got stuck in his stammer—“we might—we might”—and had to stop and swallow heavily.

  “We might go out, and come back again, you mean?” Isabel offered helpfully. “In fact, there is a place I have meant to visit, since my return—I was in Italy, until the evening before last.” She paused, struck in wonderment at the thought of all that had taken place in her life in so short a span of time. “It’s not a place of any consequence,” she resumed, “as you should see if you were to accompany me there. Indeed, I’m sure you’d laugh at me as being capricious to the point of silliness.”

  Mr. Devenish was already rising from his chair. “I’m always ready to follow a caprice,” he gallantly declared. “Just let me creep up first and check on the patient to make sure she’s at rest.”

  He fairly sprinted from the room, and returned hardly a moment later, panting and smiling, to announce that the ailing woman was sleeping soundly and apparently in no pain or distress.

  “Well then,” said Isabel, “let us go!”

  They left the house, Mr. Devenish having informed Daisy of their, to him, mysterious outing, and walked together to the cab rank nearby. The day was still oppressively overcast. Isabel enquired of her companion how his journalism work was progressing, at which he sighed and launched into a droll account of the woes attendant upon anyone foolish enough to take up a cause along with a career—“The road to Socialism is long and winding, of that much I can assure you”—and at points in this litany she found herself laughing aloud, wondering, as she did so, when was the last time she had been given cause for simple and unaffected mirth. When they were in the carriage, they moved on from Mr. Devenish’s affairs to the not unrelated topic of Miss Janeway’s numerous projects and protests, which was the occasion for Mr. Devenish to rehearse that lady’s heartfelt pledges of gratitude for Mrs. Osmond’s bounteous generosity—he was speaking of that famously mislaid satchel of banknotes—but Isabel shook her head to stop him. He glanced at her sideways, struck by the sudden seriousness that had come into her manner.

  “I don’t think of it as bounty, or of myself as gener
ous,” she said. “I was, and am, embarrassed by the childish impulse that led me to withdraw such a monstrous sum of cash from the bank. Further, and even more shamingly, I must confess that I left that rather ridiculous bag of money at your aunt’s house by mistake, and only afterwards thought to donate it to what I suppose I must accustom myself from now on to calling ‘the cause.’ ”

  Mr. Devenish had listened to this candid owning-up with amusement more than anything else; his attention had been sharply caught, however, by the young woman’s final words.

  “You say you must accustom yourself to the term,” he noted thoughtfully. “That would sound to some ears—to Miss Janeway’s, certainly—as conceding that the first long step has been taken towards your committing yourself to the cause.” He turned now and looked at her directly, and when he spoke, all traces of drollery had been banished from his voice. “Would it be a mistake for Miss Janeway, or for others—myself, for example—to imagine that is indeed what your words should be understood to have conveyed, whether intentionally or otherwise?”

  Isabel turned away from him, and looked out at the hot grey pavements and the random pedestrians passing to and fro upon them.

  “Many things have occurred in my life in recent times, things unexpected and often unpleasant—in fact, almost beyond bearing, some of them. I may tell you about them, some day, should our acquaintance continue long enough.” She turned back to face him. “I have a fortune; not a great one, but a fortune, nonetheless, and I am”—she paused, and her lips twitched in an ironical small smile—“I suppose the word is ‘free.’ That being the case, there must be something to the service of which I can devote my freedom, and my fortune. I used to think my first and sacred duty was to myself, and to the working out of my ‘fate’—another of those words I am no longer sure I know the meaning of, though it hardly matters, since I employ them now to myself only within the confines of quotation marks.” She looked away from him again, and faced forward this time, over the back of their horse and into the oncoming light of afternoon. “I shall remain in London, and help you tend your aunt, if you will let me, until her struggle is over. Her end will mark, for me, a beginning”—she glanced at him quickly, almost fearfully—“or does that seem like my old selfishness asserting itself again?”