Part 26 (1/2)

”It depends on Rachel,” he said. ”I return to London to settle my business there, and then shall either go home ahead of her, to prepare the villa and the servants for her reception, or wait and travel with her. You know, of course, that she intends to go?”

”Yes,” I answered.

”I am relieved that you have not put any pressure upon her to remain,” he said. ”I quite understand, that with your illness you became greatly dependent on her; she told me as much. And she has been anxious to spare your feelings in every way. But, as I explained to her, this cousin of yours is now a man, and not a child. If he cannot stand upon his own feet, he must learn to do so. Am I not right?” he asked me.

”Perfectly.”

”Women, especially Rachel, act always from emotion. We men, more usually though not always so, with reason. I am glad to see you sensible. Perhaps in spring, when you visit us in Florence, you will allow me to show you some of the treasures there. You will not be disappointed.” He blew another cloud of smoke up to the ceiling.

”When you say 'we,' ” I ventured, ”do you use it in the royal sense, as if you owned the city, or is it a legal phrase?”

”Forgive me,” he said, ”but I am so accustomed to acting for Rachel, even to thinking for her, in so many ways, that I can never entirely dissociate myself from her and so fall to using that particular p.r.o.noun personal.” He looked across at me. ”In time,” he said, ”I have good reason to believe that I shall come to use it in a sense more intimate. But that”-he gestured, his cigar in hand-”is in the laps of the G.o.ds. Ah, here she comes.”

He stood up, and so did I, when Rachel came into the room; and as she gave her hand to him, which he took and kissed, she made him welcome in Italian. Perhaps it was watching them at dinner, I do not know-his eyes, that never left her face, her smile, her change of manner with him-but I felt, rising within me, a sort of nausea. The food I ate tasted of dust. Even the tisana, which she made for the three of us to drink when dinner was over, had a bitter unaccustomed tang. I left them, sitting in the garden, and went up to my room. As soon as I had gone I heard their voices break into Italian. I sat in the chair by my window, where I had sat during those first days and weeks of convalescence, and she beside me; and it was as though the whole world had turned evil, and of a sudden, sour. I could not bring myself to descend and say good night to him. I heard the carriage come, I heard the carriage drive away. I went on sitting in my chair. Presently Rachel came up and tapped upon my door. I did not answer. She opened it, and entering the room came to my side, and put her hand upon my shoulder.

”What is it now?” she asked. There was a sort of sigh about her voice, as if she had reached the limit of endurance. ”He could not have been more courteous, or kind,” she said to me. ”What fault was there tonight?”

”None,” I answered.

”He speaks so well of you to me,” she said, ”if you could only hear him, you would realize that he has a great regard for you. This evening you surely could not take exception to anything he said? If only you could be less difficult, less jealous...”

She drew the curtains of my room, for dusk was nearly come. Even in her gesture, the way she touched the curtain, there was impatience.

”Are you going to sit there, hunched in that chair, till midnight?” she asked. ”If so, put a wrap about you, or you will take cold. For my part, I am exhausted and shall go to bed.”

She touched my head, and went. Not a caress. The quick gesture of someone patting a child who has misbehaved, the adult finding herself too lost in tedium to continue scolding, but brus.h.i.+ng the whole aside. ”There... there... For heaven's sake, have done.”

That night fever returned to me again. Not with the old force, but something similar. Whether it was chill or not, caught from sitting in the boat in the harbor twenty-four hours before, I do not know, but in the morning I was too giddy to stand upright upon the floor, and fell to retching and to shuddering, and was obliged to go back to bed again. The doctor was sent for, and with my aching head I wondered if the whole miserable business of my illness was to set in with repet.i.tion. He p.r.o.nounced my liver out of order, and left medicine. But when Rachel came to sit with me, in the afternoon, it seemed to me she had upon her face that same expression of the night before, a kind of weariness. I could imagine the thought within her, ”It is going to start again? Am I doomed to sit here as a nurse to all eternity?” She was more brusque with me, as she handed me my medicine; and when later I was thirsty, and wished to drink, I did not ask her for the gla.s.s, for fear of giving trouble.

She had a book in her hands, which she did not read, and her presence in the chair beside me seemed to hold a mute reproach.

”If you have other things to do,” I said at last, ”don't sit with me.”

”What else do you suppose I have to do?” she answered.

”You might wish to see Rainaldi.”

”He has gone,” she said.

My heart was the lighter for the news. I was almost well.

”He has returned to London?” I inquired.

”No,” she answered, ”he sailed from Plymouth yesterday.”

My relief was so intense that I had to turn away my head lest I showed it in my face, and so increased her irritation.

”I thought he had business still to do in England?”

”So he had; but we decided it could be done just as well by correspondence. Matters of greater urgency attended him at home. He had news of a vessel due to sail at midnight, and so went. Now are you satisfied?”

Rainaldi had left the country, I was satisfied with that. But not with the p.r.o.noun ”we”; nor that she spoke of home. I knew why he had gone-to warn the servants at the villa to make ready for their mistress. There was the urgency attending him. My sands were running out.

”When will you follow him?”

”It depends on you,” she answered.

I supposed, if I wished, I could continue to feel ill. Complain of pain, and make excuse of sickness. Drag on, pretending, for a few weeks more. And then? The boxes packed, the boudoir bare, her bed in the blue room covered with the dust-sheet that had been upon it all the years before she came, and silence.

”If,” she sighed, ”you would only be less bitter and less cruel, these last days could be happy.”

Was I bitter? Was I cruel? I had not thought so. It seemed to me the hardness was in her. There was no remedy. I reached out for her hand, and she gave it me. Yet as I kissed it I kept thinking of Rainaldi...

That night I dreamed I climbed to the granite stone and read the letter once again, buried beneath it. The dream was so vivid that it did not fade with waking, but remained throughout the morning. I got up, and was well enough to go downstairs, as usual, by midday. Try as I would, I could not shake off the desire within me to read the letter once again. I could not remember what it said about Rainaldi. I must know, for certainty, what it was Ambrose had said of him. In the afternoon Rachel went to her room to rest, and as soon as she had gone I slipped away through the woods and down to the avenue, and climbed the path above the keeper's cottage, filled with loathing for what I meant to do. I came to the granite slab. I knelt beside it and, digging with my hands, felt suddenly the soggy leather of my pocketbook. A slug had made its home there for the winter. The trail across the front was sticky. I knocked it off, and opening the pocketbook took out the crumpled letter. The paper was damp and limp, the lettering more faded than before, but still decipherable. I read the letter through. The first part more hastily, though it was strange that his illness, from another cause, could have been, in symptoms, so much similar to mine. But to Rainaldi...

”As the months pa.s.sed,” wrote Ambrose, ”I noticed more and more how she turned to this man I have mentioned before in my letters, Signor Rainaldi, a friend and I gather a lawyer of Sangalletti's, for advice, rather than to me. I believe this man to have a pernicious influence upon her. I suspect him of having been in love with her for years, even when Sangalletti was alive, and although I do not for an instant believe she ever thought of him in such a connection up to a short while ago, now, since she has altered in her manner to me, I cannot be so sure. There is a shadow in her eye, a tone in her voice, when his name is said, that awakens in my mind the most terrible suspicion.

”Brought up as she was by f.e.c.kless parents, living a life, before and even during her first marriage, about which both of us have had reserve, I have often felt her code of behavior is different to ours at home. The tie of marriage may not be so sacred. I suspect, in fact I have proof, that he gives her money. Money, G.o.d forgive me for saying so, is at the present time the one way to her heart.”

There it was, the sentence I had not forgotten, which had haunted me. Where the paper folded the words were indistinct, until I caught again the word ”Rainaldi.” ”I will come down to the terrace,” Ambrose said, ”and find Rainaldi there. At sight of me, both fall silent. I cannot but wonder what it is they have been discussing. Once, when she had gone into the villa and Rainaldi and I were left alone, he asked an abrupt question as to my will. This he had seen, incidentally, when we married. He told me that as it stood, and should I die, I would leave my wife without provision. This I knew, and had anyway drawn up a will myself that would correct the error, and would have put my signature to it, and had it witnessed, could I be certain that her fault of spending was a temporary pa.s.sing thing, and not deep-rooted.

”This new will, by the way, would give her the house and the estate for her lifetime only, and so to you upon her death, with the proviso that the running of the estate be left in your hands entirely.

”It still remains unsigned, and for the reason I have told you.

”Mark you, it is Rainaldi who asked questions on the will, Rainaldi who drew my attention to the omissions of the one that stands at present. She does not speak of it, to me. But do they speak of it, together? What is it that they say to one another, when I am not there?

”This matter of the will occurred in March. Admittedly, I was unwell, and nearly blinded with my head, and Rainaldi bringing up the matter may have done so in that cold calculating way of his, thinking that I might die. Possibly it is so. Possibly it is not discussed between them. I have no means of finding out. Too often now I find her eyes upon me, watchful and strange. And when I hold her, it is as though she were afraid. Afraid of what, of whom?

”Two days ago, which brings me to the reason for this letter, I had another attack of this same fever, which laid me low in March. The onset is sudden. I am seized with pain and sickness, which pa.s.ses swiftly to great excitation of my brain, driving me near to violence, and I can hardly stand upon my feet for dizziness of mind and body. This, in its turn, pa.s.ses, and an intolerable desire for sleep comes upon me, so that I fall upon the floor, or upon my bed, with no power over my limbs. I do not recollect my father being thus. The headaches, yes, and some difficulty of temperament, but not the other symptoms.

”Philip, my boy, the only being in the world whom I can trust, tell me what it means, and if you can, come out to me. Say nothing to Nick Kendall. Say no word to any single soul. Above all, write not a word in answer, only come.

”One thought possesses me, leaving me no peace. Are they trying to poison me?-AMBROSE.”

This time I did not put the letter back into the pocketbook. I tore it piece by piece into tiny shreds, and ground the shreds into the earth with my heel. Each shred was scattered, and then ground, in a separate place. The pocketbook, soggy from its sojourn in the earth, I was able to wrench in two with a single twist. I flung each half over my shoulder, and they fell among the bracken. Then I walked home. It seemed like a postscript to the letter, that when I entered the hall Seecombe was just bringing in the postbag, that the boy had fetched from town. He waited while I unlocked it, and there, amid the few there were for me, was one to Rachel, with the Plymouth mark upon it. I needed but to glance at the thin spidery hand to know that it was from Rainaldi. I think, if Seecombe had not been there, I would have kept it. As it was, there was nothing for it but to give it him to take up to Rachel.

It was ironic, too, that when I went up to her a little later, saying nothing of my walk or where I had been, all her sharpness with me seemed to have gone. The old tenderness had returned. She held out her arms to me, and smiled, and asked me how I felt and if I was rested. She said nothing of the letter she had received. I wondered, during dinner, whether the news it had contained had made her happy; and, as I sat eating, I pictured to myself the framework of his letter, what he had said to her, how he addressed her-if, in short, it were a letter of love. It would be written in Italian. But here and there, though, there might be words I should understand. She had taught me a few phrases. I would know, at any rate, with the first words, the relations.h.i.+p they bore to one another.

”You are very silent. Are you well?” she said.

”Yes,” I answered, ”I am well,” and flushed, lest she should read my mind and guess what I meant to do.

After dinner we went up to her boudoir. She prepared the tisana, as usual, and set it down in its cup on the table by my side, and hers as well. On the bureau lay Rainaldi's letter, half covered by her handkerchief. My eyes were drawn towards it, fascinated. Would an Italian, writing to the woman he loved, keep to formality? Or setting sail from Plymouth, with the prospect of a few weeks' separation, and having dined well, drunk his brandy and smoked his cigar, and smiling in complaisance, would he turn to indiscretion and permit himself the license of spilling love on paper?

”Philip,” said Rachel, ”you keep your eyes fixed on one corner of the room as though you saw a ghost. What is the matter?”