My Cousin Rachel (15 page)

“Dear Philip,” it said, “if you can bring yourself to do so, please forgive me for my rudeness to you tonight. It was unpardonable of me to behave so in your house. I have no excuse, except that I am not entirely myself these days; emotion lies too near the surface. I have written to your guardian, thanking him for his letter and accepting the allowance. It was generous and dear of you both to think of me. Good night. Rachel.”

I read the letter twice, and then put it in my pocket. Was her pride spent then, and the anger too? Did these feelings dissolve with the tears? A load went from me, that she had accepted the allowance. I had visualized another visit to the bank, and further explanations, countermanding my first orders; and then interviews with my godfather, and arguments, and the whole business ending most wretchedly with my cousin Rachel sweeping out of the house and taking herself to London, there to live in lodgings giving Italian lessons.

Had it cost her much to write that note, I wondered? The swing from pride to humility? I hated the fact that she had to do so. For the first time since he had died, I found myself blaming Ambrose for what had happened. Surely he might have taken some thought for the future. Illness and sudden death can come to anyone. He must have known that by making no provision he left his wife to our mercy, to our charity. A letter home to my godfather would have spared all this. I had a vision of her sitting down in aunt Phoebe’s boudoir and writing me this note. I wondered if she had left the boudoir yet and gone to bed. I hesitated for a moment, and then went along the corridor and stood under the archway by her rooms.

The door of the boudoir was open, the door of the bedroom shut. I knocked upon the bedroom door. For a moment no answer came, and then she said, “Who is it?”

I did not answer “Philip.” I opened the door, and went inside. The room was in darkness, and the light from my candle showed the curtains of the bed to be partly drawn. I could see the outline of her form under the coverlet.

“I have just read your note,” I said. “I wanted to thank you for it, and to say good night.”

I thought she might sit up and light her candle, but she did not do so. She lay just as she was, on her pillows, behind the curtains.

“I wanted you to know also,” I said, “that I had no idea of patronizing you. Please believe that.”

The voice that came from the curtains was strangely quiet and subdued.

“I never thought you had,” she answered.

We were both silent an instant, and then she said, “It would not worry me to give Italian lessons. I have no pride about that sort of thing. What I could not bear was when you said my doing so would reflect badly upon Ambrose.”

“It was true,” I said, “but forget it now. We need not think of it again.”

“It was dear of you, and very like you,” she said, “to go riding over to Pelyn to see your guardian. I must have seemed so ungracious, so completely lacking in gratitude. I can’t forgive myself.” The voice, so near to tears again, did something to me. A kind of tightness came to my throat and to my belly.

“I would much rather that you hit me,” I told her, “than that you cried.”

I heard her move in her bed, and feel for a handkerchief and blow her nose. The gesture and the sound, so commonplace and simple, happening there in the darkness behind the curtains, made me even weaker in the belly than before.

Presently she said, “I will take the allowance, Philip, but I must not trespass on your hospitality after this week. I think next Monday, if it will suit you, I should leave here and move elsewhere, perhaps to London.”

A blank feeling came over me at her words.

“Go to London?” I said. “But why? What for?”

“I only came for a few days,” she answered. “I have already stayed longer than I intended.”

“But you have not met everybody yet,” I said, “you have not done everything you are supposed to do.”

“Does it matter?” she said. “After all—it seems so pointless.”

How unlike her it sounded, that lack of spirit in her voice.

“I thought you liked it,” I said, “going about the estate, and visiting the tenants. Each day we went about it together you seemed so happy. And today, putting in those shrubs with Tamlyn. Was it all show, and were you just being polite?”

She did not answer for a moment, and then she said, “Sometimes, Philip, I think you lack all understanding.”

Probably I did. I felt sullen and hurt and I did not care.

“All right,” I said; “if you want to go, do so. It will cause a lot of talk, but no matter.”

“I should have thought,” she said, “that it would cause more talk if I stayed.”

“Talk if you stayed?” I said. “What do you mean? Don’t you realize that by rights you belong here, that if Ambrose had not been such a lunatic this would have been your home?”

“Oh, God,” she flared out at me in sudden anger, “why else do you think I came?”

I had put my foot in it again. Blundering and tactless, I had said all the wrong things. I felt suddenly hopeless and inadequate. I went up to the bed, and pulled aside the curtains, and looked down at her. She was lying propped against her pillows, her hands clasped in front of her. She was wearing something white, frilled at the neck like a choirboy’s surplice, and her hair was loose, tied behind with a piece of ribbon, as I remembered Louise’s as a child. It shook me, and surprised me, that she should look so young.

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know why you came, or what were your motives in doing all you have done. I don’t know anything about you, or about any woman. All I know is that I like it now you are here. And I don’t want you to go. Is that complicated?”

She had put her hands up to her face, almost in defense, as if she thought I meant to harm her.

“Yes,” she said, “very.”

“Then it is you who make it so,” I said, “not I.”

I folded my arms and looked at her, assuming an ease of manner I was far from feeling. Yet in a sense by standing there, while she lay in bed, I had her at a disadvantage. I did not see how a woman with her hair loose, becoming a girl again without a woman’s status, could be angry.

I saw her eyes waver. She was searching in her mind for some excuse, some new reason why she should be gone, and in a sudden flash I hit upon a master stroke of strategy.

“You told me this evening,” I said, “that I should have a designer down from London, to lay out the gardens. I know that was what Ambrose always intended to do. The fact remains that I don’t know of one, and should go mad with irritation anyway, if I had to have such a fellow about me. If you have any feeling for the place, knowing what it meant to Ambrose, you would remain here for a few months and do it for me.”

The shaft struck home. She stared in front of her, playing with her ring. I had remarked before that when preoccupied this was a trick of hers. I pushed on with my advantage.

“I never could follow the plans that Ambrose used to draw,” I said to her, “nor Tamlyn either, for that matter. He works wonders, I know, but only under direction. Time and again he has come to me this past year and asked for advice which I have been quite at a loss to give him. If you remained here—just for the autumn, when so much planting needs to be done—it would help us all.”

She twisted the ring back and forth upon her finger. “I think I should ask your godfather what he feels,” she said to me.

“It does not concern my godfather,” I said. “What do you take me for, a schoolboy under age? There is only one consideration, whether you yourself desire to stay. If you really want to go, I cannot keep you.”

She said, surprisingly, in a still small voice, “Why do you ask that? You know I want to stay.”

Sweet heaven, how could I know? She had intimated the exact opposite.

“Then you will remain, for a little while,” I said, “to do the garden? That is settled, and you won’t go back on your word?”

“I will remain,” she said, “for a little while.”

I had difficulty in not smiling. Her eyes were serious, and I had the feeling that if I smiled she would change her mind. Inwardly, I triumphed.

“Very well, then,” I said, “I will bid you good night and leave you. What about your letter to my godfather? Do you want me to put it in the postbag?”

“Seecombe has taken it,” she said.

“Then you will sleep now, and not be angry with me anymore?”

“I wasn’t angry, Philip.”

“But you were. I thought you were going to hit me.”

She looked up at me. “Sometimes you are so stupid,” she said, “that I think one day I shall. Come here.”

I drew closer, my knee touched the coverlet.

“Bend down,” she said.

She took my face between her hands and kissed me.

“Now go to bed,” she said, “like a good boy, and sleep well.” She pushed me away, and drew her curtains.

I stumbled out of the blue bedroom with my candlestick, light-headed and somehow dazed, as though I had drunk brandy, and it seemed to me that the advantage I had thought to have over her, as I stood above her and she lay on her pillows, was now completely lost. The last word, and the last gesture too, had been with her. The little girl look and the choirboy surplice had misled me. She was a woman all the time. For all that, I was happy. The misunderstanding was now over, and she had promised to remain. There had been no more tears.

Instead of going immediately to bed I went down to the library once again, to write a line to my godfather and to reassure him that all had gone off well. He need never know of the troublous evening spent by the pair of us. I scribbled my letter, and went into the hall to place it in the postbag for the morning.

Seecombe had left the bag for me, as was his custom, upon the table in the hall, with the key beside it. When I opened up the bag two other letters fell into my hand, both written by my cousin Rachel. One was addressed to my godfather Nick Kendall, as she had told me. The second letter was addressed to Signor Rainaldi in Florence. I stared at it a moment, then put it back with the other in the postbag. It was foolish of me, perhaps, senseless and absurd; the man was her friend, why should she not write a letter to him? Yet, as I went upstairs to bed, I felt exactly as if she had hit me after all.

The following day when she came downstairs, and I joined her in the garden, my cousin Rachel was as happy and unconcerned as though there had never been a rift between us. The only difference in her manner to me was that she seemed more gentle, and more tender; she teased me less, laughed with me and not at me, and kept asking my opinion as to the planting of the shrubs, not for the sake of my knowledge but for my future pleasure when I should look upon them.

“Do what you want to do,” I told her; “bid the men cut the hedgerows, fell the trees, heap up the banks yonder with shrubs, whatever you fancy will do well, I have no eye for line.”

“But I want the result to please you, Philip,” she said. “All this belongs to you, and one day will belong to your children. What if I make changes in the grounds, and when it is done you are displeased?”

“I shan’t be displeased,” I said; “and stop talking about my children. I am quite resolved to remain a bachelor.”

“Which is essentially selfish,” she said, “and very stupid of you.”

“I think not,” I answered. “I think by remaining a bachelor I shall be spared much distress and anxiety of mind.”

“Have you ever thought what you would lose?”

“I have a shrewd guess,” I told her, “that the blessings of married bliss are not all they are claimed to be. If it’s warmth and comfort that a man wants, and something beautiful to look upon, he can get all that from his own house, if he loves it well.”

To my astonishment she laughed so much at my remark that Tamlyn and the gardeners, working at the far end of the plantation, raised their heads to look at us.

“One day,” she said to me, “when you fall in love, I shall remind you of those words. Warmth and comfort from stone walls, at twenty-four. Oh, Philip!” And the bubble of laughter came from her again.

I could not see that it was so very funny.

“I know quite well what you mean,” I said; “it just happens that I have never been moved that way.”

“That’s very evident,” she said. “You must be a heartbreak to the neighborhood. That poor Louise…”

But I was not going to be led into a discussion on Louise, nor again a dissertation upon love and matrimony. I was much more interested to watch her work upon the garden.

October set in fine and mild, and for the first three weeks of it we had barely no rain at all, so that Tamlyn and the men, under the supervision of my cousin Rachel, were able to go far ahead with the work in the plantation. We managed also to visit in succession all the tenants upon the estate, which gave great satisfaction, as I knew it would. I had known every one of them since boyhood, and had been used to calling in upon them every so often, for it was part of my work to do so. But it was a new experience for my cousin Rachel, brought up in Italy to a very different life. Her manner with the people could not have been more right or proper, and it was a fascination to watch her with them. The blend of graciousness and cameraderie made them immediately look up to her, yet put them at their ease. She asked all the right questions, replied with the right answers. Also—and this endeared her to many of them—there was the understanding she seemed to have of all their ailments, and the remedies she produced. “With my love for gardening,” she told them, “goes a knowledge of herbs. In Italy we always made a study of these things.” And she would produce balm, from some plant, to rub upon wheezing chests, and oil from another, as a measure against burns; and she would instruct them too how to make tisana, as a remedy for indigestion and for sleeplessness—the best nightcap in the world, she said to them—and tell them how the juice of certain fruits could cure almost any ill from a sore throat to a sty on the eyelid.

“You know what will happen,” I told her; “you will take the place of midwife in the district. They will send for you in the night to deliver babies, and once that starts there will be no peace for you at all.”

“There is a tisana for that too,” she said, “made from the leaves of raspberries and of nettles. If a woman drinks that for six months before the birth, she has her baby without pain.”

“That’s witchcraft,” I said. “They wouldn’t think it right to do so.”

“What nonsense! Why should women suffer?” said my cousin Rachel.

Sometimes, in the afternoons, she would be called upon by the county, as I had warned her. And she was as successful with the “gentry,” as Seecombe called them, as she was with the humbler folk. Seecombe, I soon came to realize, now lived in a seventh heaven. When the carriages drove up to the door upon a Tuesday or a Thursday, at three o’clock of an afternoon, he would be waiting in the hall. He still wore mourning, but his coat was new, kept only for these occasions. The luckless John would have the task of opening the front door to the visitors, then of passing them onto his superior, who with slow and stately step (I would have it all from John afterwards) preceded the visitors through the hall to the drawing room. Throwing the door open with a flourish (this from my cousin Rachel) he would announce the names like the toastmaster at a banquet. Beforehand, she told me, he would discuss with her the likelihood of this or that visitor appearing, and give her a brief résumé of their family history up to date. He was generally right in his prophecy of who would appear, and we wondered whether there was some method of sending messages from household to household through the servants’ hall to give due warning, even as savages beat tom-toms in a jungle. For instance, Seecombe would tell my cousin Rachel that he had it for certain that Mrs. Tremayne had ordered her carriage for Thursday afternoon, and that she would bring with her the married daughter Mrs. Gough, and the unmarried daughter Miss Isobel; and that my cousin Rachel must beware when she talked to Miss Isobel, as the young lady suffered from an affliction of the speech. Or again, that upon a Tuesday old Lady Penryn would be likely to appear, because she always visited her granddaughter upon that day, who lived only ten miles distant from us; and my cousin Rachel must remember on no account to mention foxes before her, as Lady Penryn had been frightened by a fox before her eldest son was born, and he carried the stigma as a birthmark upon his left shoulder to this day.

“And Philip,” said my cousin Rachel afterwards, “the whole time she was with me I had to head the conversation away from hunting. It was no use, she came back to it like a mouse sniffing at cheese. And finally, to keep her quiet, I had to invent a tale of chasing wild cats in the Alps, which is an impossibility, and something no one has done.”

There was always some story of the callers with which she greeted me when I returned home, slinking by the back way through the woods when the last carriage had bowled safely down the drive; and we would laugh together, and she would smooth her hair before the mirror and straighten the cushions, while I polished off the last of the sweet cakes that had been put before the visitors. The whole thing would seem like a game, like a conspiracy; yet I think she was happy there, sitting in the drawing room making conversation. People and their lives had interest for her, how they thought, and what they did; and she used to say to me, “But you don’t understand, Philip, this is all so new after the very different society in Florence. I have always wondered about life in England, in the country. Now I am beginning to know. And I love every minute of it.”

I would take a lump out of the sugar bowl, and crunch it, and cut myself a slice from the seedcake.

“I can think of nothing more monotonous,” I told her, “than discussing generalities with anyone, in Florence or in Cornwall.”

“Ah, but you are hopeless,” she said, “and will end up very narrow-minded, thinking of nothing but turnips and of kale.”

I would fling myself down in the chair, and on purpose to try her put my muddy boots up on the stool, watching her with one eye. She never reproved me, and if she had noticed did not appear to do so.

“Go on,” I would say, “tell me the latest scandal in the county.”

“But if you are not interested,” she would answer, “why should I do so?”

“Because I like to hear you talk.”

So before going upstairs to change for dinner she would regale me with county gossip, what there was of it—the latest betrothals, marriages, and deaths, the new babies on the way; she appeared to glean more from twenty minutes’ conversation with a stranger than I would from an acquaintance after a lifetime.

“As I suspected,” she told me, “you are the despair of every mother within fifty miles.”

“Why so?”

“Because you do not choose to look at any of their daughters. So tall, so presentable, so eligible in every way. Pray, Mrs. Ashley, do prevail upon your cousin to go out more.”

“And what is your answer?”

“That you find all the warmth and entertainment that you need within these four walls. On second thoughts,” she added, “that might be misconstrued. I must watch my tongue.”

“I don’t mind what you tell them,” I said, “as long as you do not involve me in an invitation. I have no desire to look at anybody’s daughter.”

“There is heavy betting upon Louise,” she said; “quite a number say that she will get you in the end. And the third Miss Pascoe has a sporting chance.”

“Great heaven!” I exclaimed. “Belinda Pascoe? I’d as soon marry Katie Searle, who does the washing. Really, cousin Rachel, you might protect me. Why not tell these gossips I’m a recluse and spend all my spare time scribbling Latin verses? That might shake them.”

“Nothing will shake them,” she answered. “The thought that a good-looking young bachelor should like solitude and verse would make you sound all the more romantic. These things whet appetite.”

“Then they’ll feed elsewhere,” I replied. “What staggers me is the way in which the minds of women in this part of the world—perhaps it’s the same everywhere—run perpetually upon marriage.”

“They haven’t much else to think about,” she said; “the choice of fare is small. I do not escape discussion, I can tell you. A list of eligible widowers has been given me. There is a peer down in west Cornwall declared to be the very thing. Fifty, an heir, and both daughters married.”

“Not old St. Ives?” I said in tones of outrage.

“Why, yes, I believe that is the name. They say he’s charming.”

“Charming, is he?” I said to her. “He’s always drunk by midday, and creeps around the passages after the maids. Billy Rowe, from the Barton, had a niece in service there. She had to come back home, she grew so scared.”

“Who’s talking gossip now?” said cousin Rachel. “Poor Lord St. Ives, perhaps if he had a wife he wouldn’t creep about the passages. It would, of course, depend upon the wife.”

“Well, you’re not going to marry him,” I said with firmness.

“You could at least invite him here to dinner?” she suggested, her eyes full of that solemnity that I had learned now spelled mischief. “We could have a party, Philip. The prettiest young women for you, and the best-favored widowers for me. But I think I have made my choice. I think, if I am ever put to it, I will take your godfather, Mr. Kendall. He has a fair direct way of speaking, which I much admire.”

Maybe she did it on purpose, but I rose to the bait, exploding.

“You cannot seriously mean it?” I said. “Marry my godfather? Why damn it, cousin Rachel, he’s nearing sixty; and he’s never without a chill or some complaint.”

“That means he doesn’t find warmth or comfort inside his house as you do,” she answered me.

I knew then that she was laughing, so laughed with her; but afterwards I wondered about it with mistrust. Certainly my godfather was most courteous when he came on Sundays, and they got on capitally together. We had dined there once or twice, and my godfather had sparkled in a way unknown to me. But he had been a widower for ten years. Surely he could not entertain so incredible an idea as to fancy his chance with my cousin Rachel? And surely she would not accept? I went hot at the thought. My cousin Rachel at Pelyn. My cousin Rachel, Mrs. Ashley, becoming Mrs. Kendall. How monstrous! If anything so presumptuous was passing through the old man’s mind I was damned if I would continue inviting him to Sunday dinner. Yet to break the invitation would be to break the routine of years. It was not possible. Therefore I must continue as we had always done, but the next Sunday, when my godfather on the right of my cousin Rachel bent his deaf ear to her, and suddenly sat back, laughing and saying, “Oh, capital, capital,” I wondered sulkily what it portended and why it was that they laughed so much together. This, I thought to myself, is another trick of women, to throw a jest in the air that left a sting behind it.

She sat there, at Sunday dinner, looking remarkably well and in high good humor, with my godfather on her right and the vicar on her left, none of them at a loss for conversation, and for no good reason I turned sulky and silent, just as Louise had done that first Sunday, and our end of the table had all the appearance of a Quaker meeting. Louise sat looking at her plate, and I at mine, and I suddenly lifted my eyes and saw Belinda Pascoe, with round eyes, gaping at me; and remembering the gossip of the countryside I became more dumb than ever. Our silence spurred my cousin Rachel to greater effort, in order, I suppose, to cover it; and she and my godfather and the vicar tried to cap each other, quoting verse, while I became more and more sulky, and thankful for the absence of Mrs. Pascoe through indisposition. Louise did not matter. I was not obliged to talk to Louise.

But when they had all gone my cousin Rachel took me to task. “When,” she said, “I entertain your friends, I look to have a little support from you. What was wrong, Philip? You sat there scowling, with a mulish face, and never addressed a word to either neighbor. Those poor girls…” And she shook her head at me, displeased.

“There was so much gaiety at your end,” I answered her, “that I saw no point in contributing to it. All that nonsense about ‘I love you’ in Greek. And the vicar telling you that ‘my heart’s delight’ sounded very well in Hebrew.”

“Well, so it did,” she said. “It came rolling off his tongue, and I was most impressed. And your godfather wants to show me the beacon head by moonlight. Once seen, he tells me, never forgotten.”