its warmth. What must be his feelings to-day in regard to his too zealous benefactress, and what
expression must they have found on the part of such a master of irony? It is a singular, but a
characteristic, fact that before Isabel returned from her silent drive she had broken its silence by
the soft exclamation: "Poor, poor Madame Merle!"
Her compassion would perhaps have been justified if on this same afternoon she had been
concealed behind one of the valuable curtains of time-softened damask which dressed the
interesting little salon of the lady to whom it referred; the carefully-arranged apartment to which
we once paid a visit in company with the discreet Mr. Rosier. In that apartment, towards six
o'clock, Gilbert Osmond was seated, and his hostess stood before him as Isabel had seen her stand
on an occasion commemorated in this history with an emphasis appropriate not so much to its
apparent as to its real importance.
"I don't believe you're unhappy; I believe you like it," said Madame Merle.
"Did I say I was unhappy?" Osmond asked with a face grave enough to suggest that he might have
been.
"No, but you don't say the contrary, as you ought in common gratitude."
"Don't talk about gratitude," he returned dryly. "And don't aggravate me," he added in a moment.
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Madame Merle slowly seated herself, with her arms folded and her white hands arranged as a
support to one of them and an ornament, as it were, to the other. She looked exquisitely calm but
impressively sad. "On your side, don't try to frighten me. I wonder if you guess some of my
thoughts."
"I trouble about them no more than I can help. I've quite enough of my own."
"That's because they're so delightful."
Osmond rested his head against the back of his chair and looked at his companion with a cynical
directness which seemed also partly an expression of fatigue. "You do aggravate me," he remarked
in a moment. "I'm very tired."
"Eh moi donc!" cried Madame Merle.
"With you it's because you fatigue yourself. With me it's not my own fault."
"When I fatigue myself it's for you. I've given you an interest. That's a great gift."
"Do you call it an interest?" Osmond enquired with detachment.
"Certainly, since it helps you to pass your time."
"The time has never seemed longer to me than this winter."
"You've never looked better; you've never been so agreeable, so brilliant."
"Damn my brilliancy!" he thoughtfully murmured. "How little, after all, you know me!"
"If I don't know you I know nothing," smiled Madame Merle. "You've the feeling of complete
success."
"No, I shall not have that till I've made you stop judging me."
"I did that long ago. I speak from old knowledge. But you express yourself more too."
Osmond just hung fire. "I wish you'd express yourself less!"
"You wish to condemn me to silence? Remember that I've never been a chatterbox. At any rate
there are three or four things I should like to say to you first. Your wife doesn't know what to do
with herself," she went on with a change of tone.
"Pardon me; she knows perfectly. She has a line sharply drawn. She means to carry out her ideas."
"Her ideas to-day must be remarkable."
"Certainly they are. She has more of them than ever."
"She was unable to show me any this morning," said Madame Merle. "She seemed in a very
simple, almost in a stupid, state of mind. She was completely bewildered."
"You had better say at once that she was pathetic."
"Ah no, I don't want to encourage you too much."
He still had his head against the cushion behind him; the ankle of one foot rested on the other knee.
So he sat for a while. "I should like to know what's the matter with you," he said at last.
"The matter--the matter--!" And here Madame Merle stopped. Then she went on with a sudden
outbreak of passion, a burst of summer thunder in a clear sky: "The matter is that I would give my
right hand to be able to weep, and that I can't!"
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"What good would it do you to weep?"
"It would make me feel as I felt before I knew you."
"If I've dried your tears, that's something. But I've seen you shed them."
"Oh, I believe you'll make me cry still. I mean make me howl like a wolf. I've a great hope, I've a
great need, of that. I was vile this morning; I was horrid," she said.
"If Isabel was in the stupid state of mind you mention she probably didn't perceive it," Osmond
answered.
"It was precisely my deviltry that stupefied her. I couldn't help it; I was full of something bad.
Perhaps it was something good; I don't know. You've not only dried up my tears; you've dried up
my soul."
"It's not I then that am responsible for my wife's condition," Osmond said. "It's pleasant to think
that I shall get the benefit of your influence upon her. Don't you know the soul is an immortal
principle? How can it suffer alteration?"
"I don't believe at all that it's an immortal principle. I believe it can perfectly be destroyed. That's
what has happened to mine, which was a very good one to start with; and it's you I have to thank
for it. You're VERY bad," she added with gravity in her emphasis.
"Is this the way we're to end?" Osmond asked with the same studied coldness.
"I don't know how we're to end. I wish I did--How do bad people end?--especially as to their
COMMON crimes. You have made me as bad as yourself."
"I don't understand you. You seem to me quite good enough," said Osmond, his conscious
indifference giving an extreme effect to the words.
Madame Merle's self-possession tended on the contrary to diminish, and she was nearer losing it
than on any occasion on which we have had the pleasure of meeting her. The glow of her eye
turners sombre; her smile betrayed a painful effort. "Good enough for anything that I've done with
myself? I suppose that's what you mean."
"Good enough to be always charming!" Osmond exclaimed, smiling too.
"Oh God!" his companion murmured; and, sitting there in her ripe freshness, she had recourse to
the same gesture she had provoked on Isabel's part in the morning: she bent her face and covered it
with her hands.
"Are you going to weep after all?" Osmond asked; and on her remaining motionless he went on:
"Have I ever complained to you?"
She dropped her hands quickly. "No, you've taken your revenge otherwise--you have taken it on
HER."
Osmond threw back his head further; he looked a while at the ceiling and might have been
supposed to be appealing, in an informal way, to the heavenly powers. "Oh, the imagination of
women! It's always vulgar, at bottom. You talk of revenge like a third-rate novelist."
"Of course you haven't complained. You've enjoyed your triumph too much."
"I'm rather curious to know what you call my triumph."
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"You've made your wife afraid of you."
Osmond changed his position; he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and looking a
while at a beautiful old Persian rug, at his feet. He had an air of refusing to accept any one's
valuation of anything, even of time, and of preferring to abide by his own; a peculiarity which
made him at moments an irritating person to converse with. "Isabel's not afraid of me, and it's not
what I wish," he said at last. "To what do you want to provoke me when you say such things as
that?"
"I've thought over all the harm you can do me," Madame Merle answered. "Your wife was afraid
of me this morning, but in me it was really you she feared."
"You may have said things that were in very bad taste; I'm not responsible for that. I didn't see the
use of your going to see her at all: you're capable of acting without her. I've not made you afraid of
me that I can see," he went on; "how then should I have made her? You're at least as brave. I can't
think where you've picked up such rubbish; one might suppose you knew me by this time." He got
up as he spoke and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had
seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered.
He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the
mantel, he pursued: "You always see too much ins everything; you overdo it; you lose sight of the
real. I'm much simpler than you think."
"I think you're very simple." And Madame Merle kept her eye on her cup. "I've come to that with
time. I judged you, as I say, of old; but it's only since your marriage that I've understood you. I've
seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me. Please be very
careful of that precious object."
"It already has a wee bit of a tiny crack," said Osmond dryly as he put it down. "If you didn't
understand me before I married it was cruelly rash of you to put me into such a box. However, I
took a fancy to my box myself; I thought it would be a comfortable fit. I asked very little; I only
asked that she should like me."
"That she should like you so much!"
"So much, of course; in such a case one asks the maximum. That she should adore me, if you will.
Oh yes, I wanted that."
"I never adored you," said Madame Merle.
"Ah, but you pretended to!"
"It's true that you never accused me of being a comfortable fit," Madame Merle went on.
"My wife has declined--declined to do anything of the sort," said Osmond. "If you're determined to
make a tragedy of that, the tragedy's hardly for her."
"The tragedy's for me!" Madame Merle exclaimed, rising with a long low sigh but having a glance
at the same time for the contents of her mantel-shelf.
"It appears that I'm to be severely taught the disadvantages of a false position."
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"You express yourself like a sentence in a copybook. We must look for our comfort where we can
find it. If my wife doesn't like me, at least my child does. I shall look for compensations in Pansy.
Fortunately I haven't a fault to find with her."
"Ah," she said softly, "if I had a child--!"
Osmond waited, and then, with a little formal air, "The children of others may be a great interest!"
he announced.
"You're more like a copy-book than I. There's something after all that holds us together."
"Is it the idea of the harm I may do you?" Osmond asked.
"No; it's the idea of the good I may do for you. It's that," Madame Merle pursued, "that made me
so jealous of Isabel. I want it to be MY work," she added, with her face, which had grown hard and
bitter, relaxing to its habit of smoothness.
Her friend took up his hat and his umbrella, and after giving the former article two or three strokes
with his coat-cuff, "On the whole, I think," he said, "you had better leave it to me."
After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantel-shelf the attenuated
coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather
abstractedly. "Have I been so vile all for nothing?" she vaguely wailed.
CHAPTER L
As the Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the ancient monuments Isabel occasionally
offered to introduce her to these interesting relics and to give their afternoon drive an antiquarian
aim. The Countess, who professed to think her sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made an
objection, and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if they had been mounds of
modern drapery. She had not the historic sense, though she had in some directions the anecdotic,
and as regards herself the apologetic, but she was so delighted to be in Rome that she only desired
to float with the current. She would gladly have passed an hour every day in the damp darkness of
the Baths of Titus if it had been a condition of her remaining at Palazzo Roccanera. Isabel,
however, was not a severe cicerone; she used to visit the ruins chiefly because they offered an
excuse for talking about other matters than the love affairs of the ladies of Florence, as to which
her companion was never weary of offering information. It must be added that during these visits
the Countess forbade herself every form of active research; her preference was to sit in the carriage
and exclaim that everything was most interesting. It was in this manner that she had hitherto
examined the Coliseum, to the infinite regret of her niece, who-- with all the respect that she owed
her--could not see why she should not descend from the vehicle and enter the building. Pansy had
so little chance to ramble that her view of the case was not wholly disinterested; it may be divined
that she had a secret hope that, once inside, her parents' guest might be induced to climb to the
upper tiers. There came a day when the Countess announced her willingness to undertake this
feat--a mild afternoon in March when the windy month expressed itself in occasional puffs of
spring. The three ladies went into the Coliseum together, but Isabel left her companions to wander
over the place. She had often ascended to those desolate ledges from which the Roman crowd used
to bellow applause and where now the wild flowers (when they are allowed) bloom in the deep
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crevices; and to-day she felt weary and disposed to sit in the despoiled arena. It made an
intermission too, for the Countess often asked more from one's attention than she gave in return;
and Isabel believed that when she was alone with her niece she let the dust gather for a moment on
the ancient scandals of the Arnide. She so remained below therefore, while Pansy guided her
undiscriminating aunt to the steep brick staircase at the foot of which the custodian unlocks the tall
wooden gate. The great enclosure was half in shadow; the western sun brought out the pale red
tone of the great blocks of travertine--the latent colour that is the only living element in the
immense ruin. Here and there wandered a peasant or a tourist, looking up at the far sky-line where,
in the clear stillness, a multitude of swallows kept circling and plunging. Isabel presently became
aware that one of the other visitors, planted in the middle of the arena, had turned his attention to
her own person and was looking at her with a certain little poise of the head which she had some
weeks before perceived to be characteristic of baffled but indestructible purpose. Such an attitude,
to-day, could belong only to Mr. Edward Rosier; and this gentleman proved in fact to have been
considering the question of speaking to her. When he had assured himself that she was
unaccompanied he drew near, remarking that though she would not answer his letters she would
perhaps not wholly close her ears to his spoken eloquence. She replied that her stepdaughter was
close at hand and that she could only give him five minutes; whereupon he took out his watch and
sat down upon a broken block.
"It's very soon told," said Edward Rosier. "I've sold all my bibelots!" Isabel gave instinctively an
exclamation of horror; it was as if he had told her he had had all his teeth drawn. "I've sold them by
auction at the Hotel Drouot," he went on. "The sale took place three days ago, and they've
telegraphed me the result. It's magnificent."
"I'm glad to hear it; but I wish you had kept your pretty things."
"I have the money instead--fifty thousand dollars. Will Mr. Osmond think me rich enough now?"
"Is it for that you did it?" Isabel asked gently.
"For what else in the world could it be? That's the only thing I think of. I went to Paris and made
my arrangements. I couldn't stop for the sale; I couldn't have seen them going off; I think it would
have killed me. But I put them into good hands, and they brought high prices. I should tell you I
have kept my enamels. Now I have the money in my pocket, and he can't say I'm poor!" the young
man exclaimed defiantly.
"He'll say now that you're not wise," said Isabel, as if Gilbert Osmond had never said this before.
Rosier gave her a sharp look. "Do you mean that without my bibelots I'm nothing? Do you mean
they were the best thing about me? That's what they told me in Paris; oh they were very frank
about it. But they hadn't seen HER!"
"My dear friend, you deserve to succeed," said Isabel very kindly.
"You say that so sadly that it's the same as if you said I shouldn't." And he questioned her eyes
with the clear trepidation of his own. He had the air of a man who knows he has been the talk of
Paris for a week and is full half a head taller in consequence, but who also has a painful suspicion
that in spite of this increase of stature one or two persons still have the perversity to think him
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diminutive. "I know what happened here while I was away," he went on; "What does Mr. Osmond
expect after she has refused Lord Warburton?"
Isabel debated. "That she'll marry another nobleman."
"What other nobleman?"
"One that he'll pick out."
Rosier slowly got up, putting his watch into his waistcoat-pocket. "You're laughing at some one,
but this time I don't think it's at me."
"I didn't mean to laugh," said Isabel. "I laugh very seldom. Now you had better go away."
"I feel very safe!" Rosier declared without moving. This might be; but it evidently made him feel
more so to make the announcement in rather a loud voice, balancing himself a little complacently
on his toes and looking all round the Coliseum as if it were filled with an audience. Suddenly
Isabel saw him change colour; there was more of an audience than he had suspected. She turned
and perceived that her two companions had returned from their excursion. "You must really go
away," she said quickly. "Ah, my dear lady, pity me!" Edward Rosier murmured in a voice
strangely at variance with the announcement I have just quoted. And then he added eagerly, like a
man who in the midst of his misery is seized by a happy thought: "Is that lady the Countess
Gemini? I've a great desire to be presented to her."
Isabel looked at him a moment. "She has no influence with her brother."
"Ah, what a monster you make him out!" And Rosier faced the Countess, who advanced, in front
of Pansy, with an animation partly due perhaps to the fact that she perceived her sister-in-law to be
engaged in conversation with a very pretty young man.
"I'm glad you've kept your enamels!" Isabel called as she left him. She went straight to Pansy,
who, on seeing Edward Rosier, had stopped short, with lowered eyes. "We'll go back to the
carriage," she said gently.
"Yes, it's getting late," Pansy returned more gently still. And she went on without a murmur,
without faltering or glancing back. Isabel, however, allowing herself this last liberty, saw that a
meeting had immediately taken place between the Countess and Mr. Rosier. He had removed his
hat and was bowing and smiling; he had evidently introduced himself, while the Countess'
expressive back displayed to Isabel's eye a gracious inclination. These facts, none the less, w(s) ere
presently lost to sight, for Isabel and Pansy took their places again in the carriage. Pansy, who
faced her stepmother, at first kept her eyes fixed on her lap; then she raised them and rested them
on Isabel's. There shone out of each of them a little melancholy ray--a spark of timid passion
which touched Isabel to the heart. At the same time a wave of envy passed over her soul, as she
compared the tremulous longing, the definite ideal of the child with her own dry despair. "Poor
little Pansy!" she affectionately said.
"Oh never mind!" Pansy answered in the tone of eager apology. And then there was a silence; the
Countess was a long time coming. "Did you show your aunt everything, and did she enjoy it?"
Isabel asked at last.
"Yes, I showed her everything. I think she was very much pleased."
"And you're not tired, I hope."
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