Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

VOLUME II 51. CHAPTER LI (continued)

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."