had allowed herself easily to be arrested. It seemed to her that only now she fully measured the
great undertaking of matrimony. Marriage meant that in such a case as this, when one had to
choose, one chose as a matter of course for one's husband. "I'm afraid--yes, I'm afraid," she said to
herself more than once, stopping short in her walk. But what she was afraid of was not her
husband--his displeasure, his hatred, his revenge; it was not even her own later judgement of her
conduct a consideration which had often held her in check; it was simply the violence there would
be in going when Osmond wished her to remain. A gulf of difference had opened between them,
but nevertheless it was his desire that she should stay, it was a horror to him that she should go.
She knew the nervous fineness with which he could feel an objection. What he thought of her she
knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and
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marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she
had stood at the altar. She sank down on her sofa at last and buried her head in a pile of cushions.
When she raised her head again the Countess Gemini hovered before her. She had come in all
unperceived; she had a strange smile on her thin lips and her whole face had grown in an hour a
shining intimation. She lived assuredly, it might be said, at the window of her spirit, but now she
was leaning far out. "I knocked," she began, "but you didn't answer me. So I ventured in. I've been
looking at you for the past five minutes. You're very unhappy."
"Yes; but I don't think you can comfort me."
"Will you give me leave to try?" And the Countess sat down on the sofa beside her. She continued
to smile, and there was something communicative and exultant in her expression. She appeared to
have a deal to say, and it occurred to Isabel for the first time that her sister-in-law might say
something really human. She made play with her glittering eyes, in which there was an unpleasant
fascination. "After all," she soon resumed, "I must tell you, to begin with, that I don't understand
your state of mind. You seem to have so many scruples, so many reasons, so many ties. When I
discovered, ten years ago, that my husband's dearest wish was to make me miserable--of late he
has simply let me alone --ah, it was a wonderful simplification! My poor Isabel, you're not simple
enough."
"No, I'm not simple enough," said Isabel.
"There's something I want you to know," the Countess declared-- "because I think you ought to
know it. Perhaps you do; perhaps you've guessed it. But if you have, all I can say is that I
understand still less why you shouldn't do as you like."
"What do you wish me to know?" Isabel felt a foreboding that made her heart beat faster. The
Countess was about to justify herself, and this alone was portentous.
But she was nevertheless disposed to play a little with her subject. "In your place I should have
guessed it ages ago. Have you never really suspected?"
"I've guessed nothing. What should I have suspected? I don't know what you mean."
"That's because you've such a beastly pure mind. I never saw a woman with such a pure mind!"
cried the Countess.
Isabel slowly got up. "You're going to tell me something horrible."
"You can call it by whatever name you will!" And the Countess rose also, while her gathered
perversity grew vivid and dreadful. She stood a moment in a sort of glare of intention and, as
seemed to Isabel even then, of ugliness; after which she said: "My first sister-in-law had no
children."
Isabel stared back at her; the announcement was an anticlimax. "Your first sister-in-law?"
"I suppose you know at least, if one may mention it, that Osmond has been married before! I've
never spoken to you of his wife; I thought it mightn't be decent or respectful. But others, less
particular, must have done so. The poor little woman lived hardly three years and died childless. It
wasn't till after her death that Pansy arrived."
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Isabel's brow had contracted to a frown; her lips were parted in pale, vague wonder. She was trying
to follow; there seemed so much more to follow than she could see. "Pansy's not my husband's
child then?"
"Your husband's--in perfection! But no one else's husband's. Some one else's wife's. Ah, my good
Isabel," cried the Countess, "with you one must dot one's i's!"
"I don't understand. Whose wife's?" Isabel asked.
"The wife of a horrid little Swiss who died--how long?--a dozen, more than fifteen, years ago. He
never recognised Miss Pansy, nor, knowing what he was about, would have anything to say to her;
and there was no reason why he should. Osmond did, and that was better; though he had to fit on
afterwards the whole rigmarole of his own wife's having died in childbirth, and of his having, in
grief and horror, banished the little girl from his sight for as long as possible before taking her
home from nurse. His wife had really died, you know, of quite another matter and in quite another
place: in the Piedmontese mountains, where they had gone, one August, because her health
appeared to require the air, but where she was suddenly taken worse-- fatally ill. The story passed,
sufficiently; it was covered by the appearances so long as nobody heeded, as nobody cared to look
into it. But of course I knew--without researches," the Countess lucidly proceeded; "as also, you'll
understand, without a word said between us--I mean between Osmond and me. Don't you see him
looking at me, in silence, that way, to settle it?--that is to settle ME if I should say anything. I said
nothing, right or left--never a word to a creature, if you can believe that of me: on my honour, my
dear, I speak of the thing to you now, after all this time, as I've never, never spoken. It was to be
enough for me, from the first, that the child was my niece--from the moment she was my brother's
daughter. As for her veritable mother--!" But with this Pansy's wonderful aunt dropped--as,
involuntarily, from the impression of her sister-in-law's face, out of which more eyes might have
seemed to look at her than she had ever had to meet.
She had spoken no name, yet Isabel could but check, on her own lips, an echo of the unspoken.
She sank to her seat again, hanging her head. "Why have you told me this?" she asked in a voice
the Countess hardly recognised.
"Because I've been so bored with your not knowing. I've been bored, frankly, my dear, with not
having told you; as if, stupidly, all this time I couldn't have managed! Ca me depasse, if you don't
mind my saying so, the things, all round you, that you've appeared to succeed in not knowing. It's a
sort of assistance--aid to innocent ignorance--that I've always been a bad hand at rendering; and in
this connexion, that of keeping quiet for my brother, my virtue has at any rate finally found itself
exhausted. It's not a black lie, moreover, you know," the Countess inimitably added. "The facts are
exactly what I tell you."
"I had no idea," said Isabel presently; and looked up at her in a manner that doubtless matched the
apparent witlessness of this confession.
"So I believed--though it was hard to believe. Had it never occurred to you that he was for six or
seven years her lover?"
"I don't know. Things HAVE occurred to me, and perhaps that was what they all meant."
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"She has been wonderfully clever, she has been magnificent, about Pansy!" the Countess, before
all this view of it, cried.
"Oh, no idea, for me," Isabel went on, "ever DEFINITELY took that form." She appeared to be
making out to herself what had been and what hadn't. "And as it is--I don't understand."
She spoke as one troubled and puzzled, yet the poor Countess seemed to have seen her revelation
fall below its possibilities of effect. She had expected to kindle some responsive blaze, but had
barely extracted a spark. Isabel showed as scarce more impressed than she might have been, as a
young woman of approved imagination, with some fine sinister passage of public history. "Don't
you recognise how the child could never pass for HER husband's?--that is with M. Merle himself,"
her companion resumed. "They had been separated too long for that, and he had gone to some far
country--I think to South America. If she had ever had children--which I'm not sure of--she had
lost them. The conditions happened to make it workable, under stress (I mean at so awkward a
pinch), that Osmond should acknowledge the little girl. His wife was dead--very true; but she had
not been dead too long to put a certain accommodation of dates out of the question--from the
moment, I mean, that suspicion wasn't started; which was what they had to take care of. What was
more natural than that poor Mrs. Osmond, at a distance and for a world not troubling about trifles,
should have left behind her, poverina, the pledge of her brief happiness that had cost her her life?
With the aid of a change of residence--Osmond had been living with her at Naples at the time of
their stay in the Alps, and he in due course left it for ever--the whole history was successfully set
going. My poor sister-in-law, in her grave, couldn't help herself, and the real mother, to save HER
skin, renounced all visible property in the child."
"Ah, poor, poor woman!" cried Isabel, who herewith burst into tears. It was a long time since she
had shed any; she had suffered a high reaction from weeping. But now they flowed with an
abundance in which the Countess Gemini found only another discomfiture.
"It's very kind of you to pity her!" she discordantly laughed. "Yes indeed, you have a way of your
own--!"
"He must have been false to his wife--and so very soon!" said Isabel with a sudden check.
"That's all that's wanting--that you should take up her cause!" the Countess went on. "I quite agree
with you, however, that it was much too soon."
"But to me, to me--?" And Isabel hesitated as if she had not heard; as if her question--though it was
sufficiently there in her eyes--were all for herself.
"To you he has been faithful? Well, it depends, my dear, on what you call faithful. When he
married you he was no longer the lover of another woman--SUCH a lover as he had been, cara
mia, between their risks and their precautions, while the thing lasted! That state of affairs had
passed away; the lady had repented, or at all events, for reasons of her own, drawn back: she had
always had, too, a worship of appearances so intense that even Osmond himself had got bored with
it. You may therefore imagine what it was--when he couldn't patch it on conveniently to ANY of
those he goes in for! But the whole past was between them."
"Yes," Isabel mechanically echoed, "the whole past is between them."
"Ah, this later past is nothing. But for six or seven years, as I say, they had kept it up."
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She was silent a little. "Why then did she want him to marry me?"
"Ah my dear, that's her superiority! Because you had money; and because she believed you would
be good to Pansy."
"Poor woman--and Pansy who doesn't like her!" cried Isabel.
"That's the reason she wanted some one whom Pansy would like. She knows it; she knows
everything."
"Will she know that you've told me this?"
"That will depend upon whether you tell her. She's prepared for it, and do you know what she
counts upon for her defence? On your believing that I lie. Perhaps you do; don't make yourself
uncomfortable to hide it. Only, as it happens this time, I don't. I've told plenty of little idiotic fibs,
but they've never hurt any one but myself."
Isabel sat staring at her companion's story as at a bale of fantastic wares some strolling gypsy
might have unpacked on the carpet at her feet. "Why did Osmond never marry her?" she finally
asked.
"Because she had no money." The Countess had an answer for everything, and if she lied she lied
well. "No one knows, no one has ever known, what she lives on, or how she has got all those
beautiful things. I don't believe Osmond himself knows. Besides, she wouldn't have married him."
"How can she have loved him then?"
"She doesn't love him in that way. She did at first, and then, I suppose, she would have married
him; but at that time her husband was living. By the time M. Merle had rejoined--I won't say his
ancestors, because he never had any--her relations with Osmond had changed, and she had grown
more ambitious. Besides, she has never had, about him," the Countess went on, leaving Isabel to
wince for it so tragically afterwards--"she HAD never had, what you might call any illusions of
INTELLIGENCE. She hoped she might marry a great man; that has always been her idea. She has
waited and watched and plotted and prayed; but she has never succeeded. I don't call Madame
Merle a success, you know. I don't know what she may accomplish yet, but at present she has very
little to show. The only tangible result she has ever achieved--except, of course, getting to know
every one and staying with them free of expense--has been her bringing you and Osmond together.
Oh, she did that, my dear; you needn't look as if you doubted it. I've watched them for years; I
know everything--everything. I'm thought a great scatterbrain, but I've had enough application of
mind to follow up those two. She hates me, and her way of showing it is to pretend to be for ever
defending me. When people say I've had fifteen lovers she looks horrified and declares that quite
half of them were never proved. She has been afraid of me for years, and she has taken great
comfort in the vile, false things people have said about me. She has been afraid I'd expose her, and
she threatened me one day when Osmond began to pay his court to you. It was at his house in
Florence; do you remember that afternoon when she brought you there and we had tea in the
garden? She let me know then that if I should tell tales two could play at that game. She pretends
there's a good deal more to tell about me than about her. It would be an interesting comparison! I
don't care a fig what she may say, simply because I know YOU don't care a fig. You can't trouble
your head about me less than you do already. So she may take her revenge as she chooses; I don't
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think she'll frighten you very much. Her great idea has been to be tremendously irreproachable--a
kind of full-blown lily--the incarnation of propriety. She has always worshipped that god. There
should be no scandal about Caesar's wife, you know; and, as I say, she has always hoped to marry
Caesar. That was one reason she wouldn't marry Osmond; the fear that on seeing her with Pansy
people would put things together-- would even see a resemblance. She has had a terror lest the
mother should betray herself. She has been awfully careful; the mother has never done so."
"Yes, yes, the mother has done so," said Isabel, who had listened to all this with a face more and
more wan. "She betrayed herself to me the other day, though I didn't recognise her. There appeared
to have been a chance of Pansy's making a great marriage, and in her disappointment at its not
coming off she almost dropped the mask."
"Ah, that's where she'd dish herself!" cried the Countess. "She has failed so dreadfully that she's
determined her daughter shall make it up."
Isabel started at the words "her daughter," which her guest threw off so familiarly. "It seems very
wonderful," she murmured; and in this bewildering impression she had almost lost her sense of
being personally touched by the story.
"Now don't go and turn against the poor innocent child!" the Countess went on. "She's very nice, in
spite of her deplorable origin. I myself have liked Pansy; not, naturally, because she was hers, but
because she had become yours."
"Yes, she has become mine. And how the poor woman must have suffered at seeing me--!" Isabel
exclaimed while she flushed at the thought.
"I don't believe she has suffered; on the contrary, she has enjoyed. Osmond's marriage has given
his daughter a great little lift. Before that she lived in a hole. And do you know what the mother
thought? That you might take such a fancy to the child that you'd do something for her. Osmond of
course could never give her a portion. Osmond was really extremely poor; but of course you know
all about that. Ah, my dear," cried the Countess, "why did you ever inherit money?" She stopped a
moment as if she saw something singular in Isabel's face. "Don't tell me now that you'll give her a
dot. You're capable of that, but I would refuse to believe it. Don't try to be too good. Be a little
easy and natural and nasty; feel a little wicked, for the comfort of it, once in your life!"
"It's very strange. I suppose I ought to know, but I'm sorry," Isabel said. "I'm much obliged to
you."
"Yes, you seem to be!" cried the Countess with a mocking laugh. "Perhaps you are--perhaps you're
not. You don't take it as I should have thought."
"How should I take it?" Isabel asked.
"Well, I should say as a woman who has been made use of." Isabel made no answer to this; she
only listened, and the Countess went on. "They've always been bound to each other; they remained
so even after she broke off--or HE did. But he has always been more for her than she has been for
him. When their little carnival was over they made a bargain that each should give the other
complete liberty, but that each should also do everything possible to help the other on. You may
ask me how I know such a thing as that. I know it by the way they've behaved. Now see how much
better women are than men! She has found a wife for Osmond, but Osmond has never lifted a little
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finger for HER. She has worked for him, plotted for him, suffered for him; she has even more than
once found money for him; and the end of it is that he's tired of her. She's an old habit; there are
moments when he needs her, but on the whole he wouldn't miss her if she were removed. And,
what's more, today she knows it. So you needn't be jealous!" the Countess added humorously.
Isabel rose from her sofa again; she felt bruised and scant of breath; her head was humming with
new knowledge. "I'm much obliged to you," she repeated. And then she added abruptly, in quite a
different tone: "How do you know all this?"
This enquiry appeared to ruffle the Countess more than Isabel's expression of gratitude pleased
her. She gave her companion a bold stare, with which, "Let us assume that I've invented it!" she
cried. She too, however, suddenly changed her tone and, laying her hand on Isabel's arm, said with
the penetration of her sharp bright smile: "Now will you give up your journey?"
Isabel started a little; she turned away. But she felt weak and in a moment had to lay her arm upon
the mantel-shelf for support. She stood a minute so, and then upon her arm she dropped her dizzy
head, with closed eyes and pale lips.
"I've done wrong to speak--I've made you ill!" the Countess cried.
"Ah, I must see Ralph!" Isabel wailed; not in resentment, not in the quick passion her companion
had looked for; but in a tone of far-reaching, infinite sadness.
CHAPTER LII
There was a train for Turin and Paris that evening; and after the Countess had left her Isabel had a
rapid and decisive conference with her maid, who was discreet, devoted and active. After this she
thought (except of her journey) only of one thing. She must go and see Pansy; from her she
couldn't turn away. She had not seen her yet, as Osmond had given her to understand that it was
too soon to begin. She drove at five o'clock to a high floor in a narrow street in the quarter of the
Piazza Navona, and was admitted by the portress of the convent, a genial and obsequious person.
Isabel had been at this institution before; she had come with Pansy to see the sisters. She knew
they were good women, and she saw that the large rooms were clean and cheerful and that the
well-used garden had sun for winter and shade for spring. But she disliked the place, which
affronted and almost frightened her; not for the world would she have spent a night there. It
produced to-day more than before the impression of a well-appointed prison; for it was not
possible to pretend Pansy was free to leave it. This innocent creature had been presented to her in a
new and violent light, but the secondary effect of the revelation was to make her reach out a hand.
The portress left her to wait in the parlour of the convent while she went to make it known that
there was a visitor for the dear young lady. The parlour was a vast, cold apartment, with new-
looking furniture; a large clean stove of white porcelain, unlighted, a collection of wax flowers
under glass, and a series of engravings from religious pictures on the walls. On the other occasion
Isabel had thought it less like Rome than like Philadelphia, but to-day she made no reflexions; the
apartment only seemed to her very empty and very soundless. The portress returned at the end of
some five minutes, ushering in another person. Isabel got up, expecting to see one of the ladies of
the sisterhood, but to her extreme surprise found herself confronted with Madame Merle. The
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effect was strange, for Madame Merle was already so present to her vision that her appearance in
the flesh was like suddenly, and rather awfully, seeing a painted picture move. Isabel had been
thinking all day of her falsity, her audacity, her ability, her probable suffering; and these dark
things seemed to flash with a sudden light as she entered the room. Her being there at all had the
character of ugly evidence, of handwritings, of profaned relics, of grim things produced in court. It
made Isabel feel faint; if it had been necessary to speak on the spot she would have been quite
unable. But no such necessity was distinct to her; it seemed to her indeed that she had absolutely
nothing to say to Madame Merle. In one's relations with this lady, however, there were never any
absolute necessities; she had a manner which carried off not only her own deficiencies but those of
other people. But she was different from usual; she came in slowly, behind the portress, and Isabel
instantly perceived that she was not likely to depend upon her habitual resources. For her too the
occasion was exceptional, and she had undertaken to treat it by the light of the moment. This gave
her a peculiar gravity; she pretended not even to smile, and though Isabel saw that she was more
than ever playing a part it seemed to her that on the whole the wonderful woman had never been so
natural. She looked at her young friend from head to foot, but not harshly nor defiantly; with a cold
gentleness rather, and an absence of any air of allusion to their last meeting. It was as if she had
wished to mark a distinction. She had been irritated then, she was reconciled now.
