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.'
'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.'
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
