A muffled tap sounded on the door, and at a word from Madame Merle there entered, not the ephebe of the glossy curls and the blue waistcoat, but the silvery guardian of the reception desk himself, bearing a card, which Madame Merle took from his fingers, and, having produced a pair of pince-nez, which Isabel had not known her heretofore to be in need of, read the name printed thereon, at sight of which her eyes widened in pleasurable but, so it seemed to Isabel, exaggerated and not quite credible surprise. “Sì, certo, fai entrare il signore,” she said, and, when the servitor had obsequiously withdrawn, lowered the glass and sat for a moment silent, regarding Isabel with an expression of quiet yet not inexuberant satisfaction.
“Well, this is a day of visitors, certainly,” she said. “Hardly have I settled to the pleasure of your company, when here is your husband come to join us!”
XXXIV
In her Albany years Isabel had read widely, if not deeply, into the history of Rome, as much for excitement as for instruction, it must be admitted. Shockingly little of what she read had remained with her, and she had sadly assumed her memory to be singularly defective, until presently there was borne in upon her the consoling fact that the majority of people, by the time they attained adulthood, had forgotten almost the entirety of what they had learned when they were young. With the approach of her marriage, and her husband’s intention that they should live not in Florence but in Rome—he had of course taken it upon himself to decide the matter, as if by perfect right—she had viewed the prospect of residing in the capital as an opportunity to be reacquainted with the glories she had read of and subsequently forgotten; deep stores of knowledge shut up within her long ago would surely be reopened to her, like so many tombs that for centuries had been sealed by time; surely the city would bring alive the ancient past by presenting to her eager gaze the very streets and squares and palaces wherein the Imperium Romanum had been played out in all its magnificence. Alas, though so much of antiquity remained intact, the city of today was a far cry from the Rome as she had figured it in her youthful imagination, an imagination fired by the numerous densely printed volumes from which she had derived much of her education, and which she had impressed herself by being able positively to flash through, as if they were no more demanding than the lighter of the productions of Mr. Dickens or of Mrs. Oliphant. No restrictions were placed upon the works she should have access to—her mother, who might have been expected to impose a degree of shielding censorship, was deceased, and her father, as he generously expressed it, didn’t give a hang what the girl read—and she had free range of the admittedly limited household library. It was in Gibbon, she thought, or in one of the contemporary recorders, Tacitus, perhaps, or Plutarch, that she had encountered a passage, in a chapter devoted to the reign of the Emperor Nero, describing, with a restraint that served only to emphasise the horror, the afternoon entertainments on offer at the Colosseum in those days. The cruelties enacted in that fell arena would have been unbearable to contemplate had they not taken place so very long ago; however, there was a detail that struck our young scholar with dreadful force, and that stayed with her when so much else had fled, which was that often one of the wild beasts, lion or tiger or the like, would, to the disgust of the howling spectators, pause a while in the midst of rending asunder and devouring some Christian martyr or Nubian slave girl, and relax on its haunches, the initial pangs of its hunger having been assuaged, and seem fondly to caress its half-dead victim with gentle pats and pushes, with licks and nuzzles, with even, sometimes, a clumsy sort of embrace. These endearments, as they appeared, were nothing of the kind, of course, no more than are a cat’s toyings with a captured mouse. But had there been an audience present that day in the Hotel d’Inghilterra, when Mrs. Osmond sat at the mercy of her lately arrived husband and his erstwhile paramour, it too would likely have voiced a violent protest at the deceptive delicacy and considerateness with which the pair of predators circled about their captive prey.
In point of fact, it was Osmond alone who circled, while Madame Merle kept to her chair at the end of the sofa, calm and handsome as she always was, with her fascinatingly one-sided smile, and her head haught and her broad back held straight, in the attitude not of one who is party to the proceedings but, rather, of a disinterested observer settled comfortably in the gallery of the courtroom. “Your wife, Gilbert, believes you stood by and let your first wife perish,” she said now, without the slightest adjustment to her majestically composed demeanour. “What do you say to that?”
It came to Isabel that she had never before heard the woman address Osmond with such easy intimacy; it seemed intentionally pointed now, like a sharp slap upon the cheek with a silk glove. Osmond, who wore a pale-cream suit and a blue cravat stuck with a silver-headed pin, had so far said not a word, but on entering the room had only stopped and stood, his hand still on the doorknob, and bent upon his wife a gaze lacking in all expression save what might be a certain faint disappointment—disappointment not at finding her there, she thought, but at the notion of her in general, of her being anywhere, at any time; he had imagined himself done with her, yet here she was. Or, rather, here he was. She had the impression that he had, as had she, lately arrived in the city—perhaps they had been on the same train. She pictured him, on arrival, hanging back on the busy platform, concealed behind a soot-blackened pillar and watching out until she had safely quitted the station. Madame Merle, having last evening received Isabel’s telegram announcing that she would come to Rome this morning, would in her turn have telegraphed Osmond, bidding him to hasten to her side, and now here they were, the pair of them, in the arena, she a lioness, tawny and sleek, and he the grizzled leopard he had always been. He was padding about here and there in the half-part of the room behind Madame Merle’s chair, picking up things and examining them with a show of interest, of absorption, even—as if, Isabel thought, with a flicker of amusement, there could possibly be anything in a room such as this that he would consider deserving of the least of his attention.
“I have always been aware of the vulgarity of your mind,” he said now, in a controlled and level tone, addressing Isabel without looking at her, “but I confess I would not have thought even you should be capable of sinking to such a depth of cruelly bad taste as to utter such a canard about me and my late wife.” He had stopped by the window, and was turning in his hands a Murano glass vase, purple in hue and of a remarkable ugliness. “How dare you,” he said softly, and almost with a kind of mildness, “how dare you make reference to that lady, even if it were only so much as to utter her name?”
Madame Merle was watching Isabel, with an expression of keen attentiveness—she was openly and unreservedly savouring the spectacle of husband and wife in conflict—and Isabel met her now candidly, with not a trace of flinching or shrinking back. She felt no fear; they would aim to maul and maim her, they might aim even to devour her, in their sleek slow way, the pard and his partner together; they might succeed, might tear every strip of flesh from her bones; she did not care. Her safety, her very survival, were the least of it; her spirit, like the martyr’s, would rise up from the blood and mire of the scorched arena, and be saved. She was glad Osmond had come: his precipitate arrival, which of course was Madame Merle’s little coup de théâtre, had given her a moment’s pause, no more than that; thereafter she had understood that it was right they both should be here, facing her, and she facing them.
Osmond had turned at last to look in her direction, still cradling the vase in his hands. “Might one enquire how you came to the preposterous notion—preposterous, disgraceful, disgusting: you find me lost for words adequate to the thing—how you arrived at the notion that—what was it?—that I allowed my wife to die? What do you know of these matters, madam? What can you know? My wife passed away a long time ago, in a far-off place, of a malignant fever. You and I had an agreement, tacit, I grant you, not to speak of her or of her tragic end. I honoured that agreement, though Heaven knows I might have used the fact of my loss to w
in your sympathy when I was in need of it.” At this Isabel allowed herself to stare; when could he ever, possibly, have thought himself in need of her sympathy? Unalloyed admiration, due respect, a fit modicum of fear—these were some of the tributes that he had asked, that he had demanded, of her; but sympathy? Or was she wronging him in this? Was he more vulnerable than she had realised? The thought chilled her, not least for the fact that it had come to her too late. “Is it part of your vengeance on me, for what misdeed only you can say,” Osmond went on, “that you have chosen now to break that sacred covenant? For I, at least, regarded it as sacred.”
It interested Isabel to note how roundabout yet inescapable were the ways by which guilt was led to betray itself, and that often it was the care the guilty ones took to avoid acknowledging or even alluding to their wrong-doing that was the unmistakable sign of their culpability. Neither Madame Merle nor Gilbert Osmond had thought to issue a direct denial of the allegation she had raised against them—and it was against them both that she had laid her charge—but instead had bent all their efforts to diverging from the central issue; it was as if a defendant in the dock were to confine himself to criticising the manner in which the description of the deed he had been indicted for was couched. Had either of them shown signs, not even of outrage but of simple startlement, at the notion of the enormity she was accusing the one of having committed and the other of having countenanced, she would have paused a moment and obliged herself to entertain a doubt. How she had pressed Staines, that evening at Mrs. Touchett’s residence, as the twilight gathered in, and the storm growled above them and the rain beat on the garden and roiled in the guttering, oh, how she had pressed, until big tears squeezed up to sit trembling on the rims of the maid’s eyelids, and her voice shook, and she beat her fists upon her breast. She had got the thing from Madame Merle’s personal maid, poor Gabriella, a simple Florentine ragazza “afeard of her own shadow,” who had overheard her mistress and Osmond, on one of his infrequent and clandestine visits to Lecce, discussing the matter in what, for that circumspect pair, must have been remarkably direct and open terms. The lady had urged her lover against the venture to Alba, given the danger to himself, but he had dismissed her fears, for a reason that, whether Madame Merle knew of it at the time, Isabel was able instantly to recall. It had happened, during the time when he was paying court to her, that she and her urbane lover had found themselves, one unseasonably damp spring morning, sheltering from the peculiarly inconsequential yet decidedly wetting Italian rain in one of Florence’s innumerable and, to Isabel, confusingly similar churches. They had strolled up the aisle at one side and, after pausing for a cursory glance at a markedly unremarkable altarpiece, were proceeding down the other, when Osmond had laid a hand upon the young woman’s arm and drawn her attention to a mural—was it by Giotto?—in which the souls of a multitude of clay-coloured corpses were being escorted, in segregated batches, by busy squadrons of angels and demons, either downwards towards the gates of a garish well of perdition, or upwards into the glory of a gold-leafed firmament. Isabel, in her impetuous fashion, had exclaimed at the majesty and frightening force of the artist’s vision, for she had a long way to go before she would learn the advisability of waiting on Osmond’s judgement on this or that work of art before putting forward her own opinion. And indeed, on this occasion, having dropped a discreet little cough and allowing a moment or two of silence to pass, Osmond had, with a less than convincing show of diffidence, ventured it as his opinion that the piece, while doubtless possessed of a certain dour force, and displaying an earnest aspiration towards the majestic, was overall a clumsy thing. “It was merely for the subject that I wished you to notice it,” he had said, smiling, and pinching the point of his beard between a finger and thumb. “Since I have been so assiduously pressing upon you those aspects and attributes of my personality, which in my estimation make me the ideal applicant for your hand in marriage”—it was this brand of irony that at the time she took for the chief sign in him of a high droll wit, and even found endearing the laboured archness of his tone—“I think it right to add to my list the happy fact that, should you consent to be my wife, to become, in plain, mere Mrs. Osmond, you may be assured that there is one form of pestilence to which you shall not lose me, since I survived a bout of it in boyhood, and may therefore fairly consider myself sufficiently immunised against it.” However, she had hardly had time to enquire the name of the malady he meant, employing as she did so a tone of mock-solemnity, in order to enter into what she judged the straight-faced frivolity of the exchange, before her lover’s expression had darkened and he had turned brusquely aside and set off at a grim stride towards the church doorway and the great dark leathern curtain overhanging it. At once it had come to her that the “pestilence” he had spoken of must be the same one to which his wife had fallen victim, and that this accounted for the sudden alteration in his temper. She had found him waiting for her outside, with his collar turned up against the grey and drifting rain, and instead of questioning him further—which of course she would not have dreamed of doing—she had linked her arm in his, and together in silence they had descended the marble steps, worn glassy-smooth by the feet of countless generations of worshippers, and stepped into the street, and back into their lives, and it had been like moving from oppressive shadow into the balm of bright sunlight. Was it only her fancy now, or had that been the moment when she had decided to accept his proposal and allow herself to become “mere Mrs. Osmond”?
Her husband now still had his eye on her, awaiting her reply; she could not recall what question it was he had asked. She felt, suddenly, the weariness of years descend upon her shoulders. What did any of this matter? What was it to her if her husband—it amazed her that she should still think of him by this formulation—what matter if he had taken his wife to Piedmont in the full expectation that she would contract the fever against which he knew himself to be almost certainly immune? What matter? She could no longer act, Isabel told herself, as if she were the appointed invigilator of the world’s wickedness.
It was Madame Merle who spoke into Osmond’s waiting silence. “She has been listening, I wager, to listeners at doors.” Although her eye was fixed upon Isabel, she had addressed her words to Osmond behind her at the window. “How else should she know anything of what you and I only were privy to?”
Osmond considered this. “There is the Touchett woman,” he said. “She is witch enough to hear through solid walls.”
Madame Merle, still regarding Isabel with a sort of smiling frown, slowly shook her broad blonde head. “No, I think that is not the source. I detect distinctly the echo of a menial’s whisperings. That maid I had—remember? The one I took with me to Lecce?”
“Remember?” Osmond snapped. “You expect me to remember some peasant girl from twenty years ago? I am not an elephant, I have not an elephant’s gift of remembering, as you seem to have.”
Isabel had been attending upon them, absorbed and appalled, as they batted the ball of their displeased and anxious speculations back and forth between them—it seemed all the uglier that one of them kept her back turned to the other, as if in compliance with a rule in some dreadful game. She felt herself to be a—how had Madame Merle expressed it?—a listener at a door, her presence disregarded. This was how they had discussed her, among themselves, from the start—she could hear in their voices the authentic ring of casual and amused contempt, could hear it as clearly as Madame Merle had claimed to have heard in hers the echo of the little Florentine maid’s whispered disclosures, long ago, to her gangly controparte inglese. How shabby it was, the whole thing, how shabby, and soiled, and dispiriting. She could bear it not a moment more. She rose abruptly from her chair, fairly surging up, like one struggling against the threat of drowning who breaks the surface of the sea and gasps in great lungfuls of the saving air.
“I must go,” she said, stammering in her distress and haste, “I must—I have to—” She stopped; she had the image of herself now not as
a saved swimmer, but as a fish hauled up and tossed upon the river bank, agape and twitching. The two persons in the room with her had abruptly disengaged their attention from each other, and were staring at her in surprise. Osmond, with an uncertain frown, came forward and placed himself beside the seated Madame Merle; he had only to set a hand upon her shoulder and they should have seemed a couple posing for their portrait to be taken by a crouched and hooded photographer. When Isabel spoke again it was to Madame Merle she addressed herself. “My purpose in coming to Rome was to inform you of a decision I have made that concerns you,” she said. “In Paris, when we met by chance that evening, you were surprised when I urged you to return to Italy. I was surprised myself. I had given no thought to the matter—I had believed you to be already in America, and that I should never see you again.”
“There were others of us who thought the same thing,” Osmond trenchantly interposed.
Madame Merle ignored the intended slight in his remark, and gave no sign of having registered it, except that her cheeks coloured a little. Isabel too ignored her husband; she wore a frown of agitated concentration, which made her seem suddenly very young; she was like a child in the classroom who has been summoned to her feet by the teacher and commanded to recite a lesson she had spent all of the previous evening striving, with much worry and effort, to learn off by heart.
“You asked then,” she resumed, still fixed on Madame Merle, “where you should live, since you had sold your house in Florence. I assured you that you should have a place in Rome, if you would agree to live here, and a modest allowance to sustain you in your new place.”
“Yes, and it was generous of you, I’m sure,” Madame Merle coolly conceded, though with a movement of her handsome shoulders that belied any sentiment of appreciation her words might have seemed to convey. “Indeed,” she went on, with a heightened emphasis, “so generous were the terms you offered that I could not but be suspicious.” She smiled coldly, her lips lifting at the left and her eyebrow at the same side inclining sharply in response. “You speak of a decision: Are you about to confirm that I was right to be sceptical?”
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