Part 14 (1/2)

”Was he much older than you?” I said to her.

”Cosimo?” she said. ”Why no, only a year or so. My mother was introduced to him in Florence, she had always wanted to know the Sangallettis. He took nearly a year before he made up his mind between my mother and myself. Then she lost her looks, poor dear, and lost him too. The bargain I picked up proved a liability. But of course Ambrose must have written you the whole story. It is not a happy one.”

I was about to say, ”No, Ambrose was more reserved than you ever knew. If there was something that hurt him, that shocked him, he would pretend it was not there, that it had not happened. He never told me anything about your life before you married him, except that Sangalletti was killed fighting, in a duel.” Instead, I said none of this. I knew suddenly that I did not want to know either. Not about Sangalletti, nor about her mother and her life in Florence. I wanted to shut the door on it. And lock it too.

”Yes,” I said, ”yes, Ambrose wrote and told me.”

She sighed, and patted the cus.h.i.+on behind her head.

”Ah, well,” she said, ”it all seems very long ago now. The girl who endured those years was another person. I had nearly ten years of it, you know, married to Cosimo Sangalletti. I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.”

”You talk,” I said, ”as if you were ninety-nine.”

”For a women I very nearly am,” she said. ”I'm thirty-five.”

She looked at me and smiled.

”Oh?” I said. ”I thought you more.”

”Which most women would take as an insult, but I as a compliment,” she said. ”Thank you, Philip.” And then, before I had time to frame an answer, she went on, ”What was really on that piece of paper you threw on the fire this morning?”

The suddenness of the attack caught me unprepared. I stared at her and swallowed hard.

”The paper?” I hedged. ”What paper?”

”You know perfectly well,” she said; ”the piece of paper with Ambrose's handwriting upon it, which you burned so that I should not see.”

I made up my mind then that a half-truth was better than a lie. Although I felt the color flame into my face, I met her eyes.

”It was a piece torn from a letter,” I said, ”a letter, I think, that he must have been writing to me. He simply expressed himself as worried about expenditure. There was only a line or two, I don't even remember how it went. I threw it in the fire because coming upon it, just at that moment, might have saddened you.”

Rather to my surprise, but to my relief also, the eyes, watching me so intently, relaxed. The hands, holding the rings, fell on her lap.

”Was that all?” she said. ”I wondered so much... I could not understand.”

Thank heaven, though, she accepted my explanation.

”Poor Ambrose,” she said, ”it was a constant source of worry to him, what he considered my extravagance; I wonder that you did not hear of it more often. The life out there was so entirely different from the one he knew at home. He never could bring himself to accept it. And then-good heaven, I cannot blame him-I know at the bottom of his heart he bore resentment against the life I had been obliged to lead before I met him. Those frightful debts, he paid them all.”

I was silent, but as I sat watching her, and smoking, I felt easier in my mind, no longer anxious. The half-truth had been successful, and she was speaking to me now without strain.

”He was so generous,” she said, ”those first months. You cannot imagine, Philip, what it meant to me; at last someone I could trust, and, what was more wonderful still, someone I could love as well. I think if I had asked him for anything on earth he would have given it to me. That was why, when he became ill...” She broke off, and her eyes were troubled. ”That was why it was so hard to understand, the way he changed.”

”You mean,” I said, ”that he wasn't generous anymore?”

”He was generous, yes,” she said, ”but not in the same way. He would buy me things, presents, pieces of jewelry, almost as though he tried to test me in some way; I can't explain it. And if I asked him for any money, some little necessity for the house, something we had to have-he would not give me the money. He used to look at me, with a strange brooding sort of suspicion; he would ask me why I wanted the money, how I intended to use it, was I going to give it to anyone... Eventually I had to go to Rainaldi, I had to ask Rainaldi, Philip, for money to pay the servants' wages.”

She broke off again, and looked at me.

”Did Ambrose find out that you did that?” I asked.

”Yes,” she said. ”He had never cared for Rainaldi, I believe I told you so before. But when he knew I went to him for money... that was the finish, he could not bear him to come to the villa anymore. You would hardly credit it, Philip, but I had to go out furtively, when Ambrose was resting, and meet Rainaldi in order to get money for the house.” Suddenly she gestured with her hands, and got up from her chair.

”Oh, G.o.d,” she said, ”I did not mean to tell you all this.”

She went over to the window, and pulled aside the curtain, and looked out at the driving rain.

”Why not?” I asked.

”Because I want you to remember him as you knew him here,” she said. ”You have your picture of him, in this house. He was your Ambrose then. Let it stay like that. The last months were mine, and I want no one to share them with me. You, least of all.”

I did not want to share them with her. I wanted her to close all those doors belonging to the past, one by one.

”You know what has happened?” she said, turning round from the window and looking at me. ”We did wrong when we opened those boxes in the room upstairs. We should have let them stay there. We were wrong to touch his things. I felt it from the first moment, when I opened the trunk and saw his dressing gown and the slippers. We have let something loose that was not with us before. Some sort of bitter feeling.” She had become very white. Her hands were clasped in front of her. ”I have not forgotten,” she said, ”those letters that you threw into the fire, and burned. I pushed the thought of them away, but today, since we opened up the trunks, it is just as though I had read them once again.”

I got up from my chair and stood with my back to the fire. I did not know what to say to her as she paced up and down the room.

”He said, in his letter, that I watched him,” she went on. ”Of course I watched him, lest he should do himself some damage. Rainaldi wanted me to have the nuns in from the convent to help me, but I would not; had I done that, Ambrose would have said they were keepers, brought in by me to spy upon him. He trusted no one. The doctors were good and patient men, but more often than not he refused to see them. One by one, he asked me to dismiss the servants. In the end, only Giuseppe remained. He trusted him. He said he had dog's eyes...”

She broke off, and turned away. I thought of the servant from the lodge by the villa gate, and his desire to spare me pain. It was strange that Ambrose too had believed in those honest, faithful eyes. And I had only looked upon the servant once.

”There is no need to talk of all that now,” I said to her: ”it does no good to Ambrose, and it only tortures you. As to myself, what happened between you and him is no concern of mine. That is all over and done with and forgotten. The villa was not his home. Nor, when you married Ambrose, was it yours either. This is your home.”

She turned and looked at me. ”Sometimes,” she said slowly, ”you are so like him that I become afraid. I see your eyes, with that same expression, turned upon me; and it is as though, after all, he had not died, and everything that was endured must be endured once more. I could not bear it again, not that suspicion, not that bitterness, going on and on, day after day, night after night.”

As she spoke, I had a clear picture of the villa Sangalletti. I saw the little court, and the laburnum tree as it would be in spring, with yellow blossom. I saw the chair there, with Ambrose sitting in it and his stick beside him. I felt the whole dark silence of the place. I smelled the musty air, I watched the dripping fountain. And for the first time the woman who looked down from the balcony above was not a figment of my imagination, but was Rachel. She looked at Ambrose with the same pleading look, that look of suffering, of supplication. Suddenly I felt very old, and very wise, and full of a new strength I did not understand. I held out my hands to her.

”Rachel. Come here,” I said.

She came across the room to me, and she put her hands in mine.

”There is no bitter feeling in this house,” I said to her. ”The house is mine. Bitterness goes with people when they die. Those clothes are all packed up and put away. They have nothing anymore to do with either of us. From now on you are going to remember Ambrose as I remember him. We'll keep his old hat there, on the settle in the hall. And the stick, with the others, in the stand. You belong here now, just as he did, just as I do. We are all three of us part of the place together. Do you understand?”

She looked up at me. She did not take away her hands.

”Yes,” she said.

I felt strangely moved, as if all that I did and said was laid down for me and planned, while at the same time a small still voice whispered to me in some dark cell of matter, ”You can never go back upon this moment. Never... never...” We stood, holding each other's hands, and she said to me, ”Why are you so good to me, Philip?”

I remembered that in the morning, when she cried, she had rested her head against my heart. I had put my arms about her, for a moment, and laid my face against her hair. I wanted it to happen again. More than anything I had ever known. But tonight she did not cry. Tonight she did not come and rest her head against my heart. She just stood there, holding my hands.

”I'm not good to you,” I said; ”I only want you to be happy.”

She moved away and picked up her candlestick to take to bed, and as she went from the room she said to me, ”Good night, Philip, and G.o.d bless you. One day you may come to know some of the happiness that I knew once.”

I heard her go upstairs, and I sat down and stared into the library fire. It seemed to me that if there was any bitterness left in the house it did not come from her, nor from Ambrose, but was a seed deep in my own heart, which I should never tell her of and she need never know. The old sin of jealousy I thought buried and forgotten was with me once again. But this time I was jealous, not of Rachel, but of Ambrose, whom hitherto I had known and loved best in the whole world.