My Cousin Rachel (30 page)

“Tell the servants,” I said. “Then it will be right and natural for me to stay with you, because we are married…” But my voice sank away to nothing, because of the expression in her eyes.

“But we are not married, Philip dear,” she said.

Something seemed to burst inside my head.

“We are married,” I said, “of course we are married. It happened on my birthday. Have you forgotten?”

But when had it happened? Where was the church? Who was the minister? All the throbbing pain returned again, and the room swung round about me.

“Tell me it’s true?” I said to her.

Then suddenly I knew that all was fantasy, that the happiness which had been mine for the past weeks was imagination. The dream was broken.

I buried my head against her, sobbing; tears had never come from me like this before, not even as a child. She held me close, her hand stroking my hair, and never speaking. Presently I won command over myself again, and lay down in the chair, exhausted. She brought me something to drink, then sat down on the stool beside me. The shadows of the summer evening played about the room. The bats crept forth from their hiding places in the eaves, and circled in the twilight outside the window.

“It would have been better,” I said, “had you let me die.”

She sighed, and laid her hand against my cheek. “If you say that,” she answered, “you destroy me too. You are unhappy now because you are still weak. But presently, when you are stronger, none of this will seem important. You will go about your work again, on the estate—there will be so much to see to that, from your illness, has been allowed to lapse. The full summer will be here. You can swim again, go sailing in the bay.”

I knew from her voice that she was talking to convince herself, not me.

“What else?” I asked.

“You know very well that you are happy here,” she said; “it is your life, and will continue to be so. You have given me the property, but I shall always look on it as yours. It will be a sort of trust between us.”

“You mean,” I said, “that letters will pass between us, from Italy to England, month after month, throughout the year. I shall say to you, ‘Dear Rachel, The camellias are in bloom.’ And you will reply to me, ‘Dear Philip, I am glad to hear it. My rose-garden is doing very well.’ Is that to be our future?”

I could see myself hanging about the gravel sweep of a morning after breakfast, waiting for the boy to bring the postbag, knowing full well there would be no letter in it, except some bill from Bodmin.

“I would be back again each summer, very probably,” she said, “to see that all went well.”

“Like the swallows, who come only for the season,” I replied, “then take wing again the first week in September.”

“I have already suggested,” she said, “that you visit me in spring. There is much that you would like in Italy. You have not traveled, save the once. You know very little of the world.”

She might have been a teacher, soothing a fractious child. Perhaps it was thus she looked upon me.

“What I have seen,” I answered, “gives me a distaste for all the rest. What would you have me do? Potter about a church or a museum, guidebook in hand? Converse with strangers, to broaden my ideas? I would rather brood at home and watch the rain.”

My voice was harsh and bitter, but I could not help it. She sighed again, and it was as though she searched about for some argument to prove to me that all was well.

“I tell you again,” she insisted, “that when you are better the whole of the future will seem different to you. Nothing is so much changed from what it was. As to the money…” she paused, looking at me.

“What money?” I said.

“The money for the property,” she went on. “All that will be placed on a proper footing, and you shall have enough to run the estate without loss, while I take what I need out of the country. It is all in process of arrangement now.”

She could take every farthing for all I cared. What had any of this to do with what I felt for her? But she went on talking.

“You must continue to make what improvements you feel justified in doing,” she said rapidly. “You know I shall query nothing, you need not even send me the bills, I can trust your judgment. Your godfather will always be near to give advice. In a little while everything will seem to you just the same as it was before I came.”

The room was deep in twilight now. I could not even see her face for the shadows all about us.

“Do you really believe that?” I said to her.

She did not answer at once. She searched for some excuse for my existence, to pile upon those that she had given me already. There were none, and she knew it well. She turned towards me, giving me her hand. “I must believe it,” she said, “or I would have no peace of mind.”

In all the months I had known her she had given me many answers to the questions, serious or otherwise, that I had put to her. Some had been laughing, some evasive, yet each one had some feminine twist to make adornment. This was direct at last, straight from the heart. She must believe me happy, to have peace of mind. I had left the land of fantasy, to her to enter into it. Two persons therefore could not share a dream. Except in darkness, as in make-believe. Each figure, then, a phantom.

“Go back if you will,” I said, “but not just yet. Give me a few weeks more to hold in memory. I am no traveler, you are my world.”

I sought to evade the future and escape. But when I held her it was not the same; faith was gone, and the first ecstasy.

We did not speak again of her departure. It was a bogey, thrust into the background by us both. For her sake I strove to appear lighthearted, without care. She did the same, for me. The summer weather was about us, and I soon grew strong again, at least to all appearance; but sometimes the pain in my head returned again, not with its full force, but stabbing, without warning, and for no good reason.

I did not tell her of it—what was the use? It did not come from physical exertion, or when I was outdoors, but only if I put my mind to thinking. Simple problems brought to me in the estate office by the tenants could even do it, so that a fog would seem to settle on me and I be unable to give them a decision.

More often, though, it would happen because of her. I would be looking at her, as we sat perhaps after dinner outside the drawing room window, for the June weather enabled us to sit without of an evening until past nine o’clock; and suddenly I would wonder what went on there, in her mind, as she sat drinking her tisana, watching the dusk creep closer to the trees that fringed the lawn. Did she ponder, in her secret self, how much longer she must endure this life of solitude? Did she think, secretively, “Next week, now he is well, I can safely go?”

That villa Sangalletti, back in Florence, had for me now another shape and atmosphere. Instead of the shuttered darkness I had seen on that one visit I saw it now as brightly lit, with all the windows wide. Those unknown people whom she called her friends wandered from room to room; there was gaiety and laughter, much noise of conversation. A sort of brilliance hung above the place, and all the fountains played. She would move from guest to guest, smiling and at ease, mistress of her domain. This, then, was the life she knew, and loved, and understood. Her months with me were an interlude. Thankfully, she would return to the home where she belonged. I could picture the first arrival, with the man Giuseppe and his wife flinging wide the iron gates to admit her carrozza, and then her happy eager pacing through the rooms she knew so well and had not seen for long, asking her servants questions, receiving their replies, opening the many letters there awaiting her, content, serene, with all the myriad threads of an existence to pick up again and hold that I could never know and never share. So many days and nights, no longer mine.

Presently she would feel my eyes upon her, and would say, “What is the matter, Philip?”

“Nothing,” I would reply.

And as the shadow passed across her face, doubtful, distressed, I felt myself a burden on her shoulders. She would be better quit of me. I tried to lose my energies, as of old, in the running of the place, in the common tasks of day by day; but it no longer meant the same to me. What if the Barton acres were all dried through lack of rain? I could not greatly care. And if our stock won prizes at the Show, and so were the champions of the county, was this glory? Last year, it might have been. But now, what an empty triumph.

I could see myself losing favor in the eyes of all who looked upon me as their master. “You are still weak, Mr. Ashley, after that sickness,” said Billy Rowe, the farmer at the Barton; and there was a world of disappointment in his voice that I had failed to show enthusiasm for his achievements. It was the same with all the rest. Even Seecombe took me to task.

“You don’t seem to pick up as you should, Mr. Philip,” he said. “We were talking of it, in the steward’s room, last evening. ‘What’s come to the master?’ Tamlyn said to me. ‘He’s whisht as a ghost on Hallowe’en, and looks at nothing.’ I would advise marsala in the morning. There is nothing like a wineglass of marsala to restore the blood.”

“Tell Tamlyn,” I said to Seecombe, “to go about his business. I am perfectly well.”

The routine of Sunday dinner, with the Pascoes and the Kendalls, had not yet been restored, which was a mercy. I think poor Mary Pascoe had returned to the rectory, after I fell ill, with tales that I was mad. I saw her look at me askance, in church, the first morning that I went when I was well; and the whole family eyed me with a sort of pity, inquiring for me with low voices and averted gaze.

My godfather came to see me, also Louise. They too assumed an unaccustomed manner, a blend of cheerfulness and sympathy, suited to a child who had been sick; and I felt they had been warned not to touch upon any subject that might cause me concern. The four of us sat like strangers in the drawing room. My godfather, I thought, is ill at ease, and wishing he had not come, but feels it to be his duty to call upon me; while Louise, with some odd instinct possessed by women, knows what has happened here and shrinks at thought of it. Rachel, as always, was in command of the situation, and kept the tenor of the conversation on the level that was required. The county Show, the betrothal of the second Pascoe daughter, the warmth of the present weather, the prospect of a change in Government—all these were easy matters. But what if we spoke the things we really thought?

“Get out of England soon, before you destroy yourself and this boy with you,” thus my godfather.

“You love her more than ever. I can see it, by your eyes,” from Louise.

“I must prevent them from making Philip anxious, at all costs,” so Rachel.

And myself, “Leave me alone with her, and go…”

Instead, we clung to courtesy, and lied. Each one of us breathed the easier at the termination of the visit, and as I watched them drive to the park gates, no doubt thankful to be away, I wished I could erect a fence about the property, as in the old enchanted tales of childhood, to keep away all callers, and disaster too.

It seemed to me, though she said nothing, that she planned the first steps towards departure. I would find her, of an evening, sorting through her books, arranging them as people do who wish to make a choice between the volumes they take with them and those they leave behind. Another time she would be sitting at the bureau, putting her papers into order, filling the wastepaper basket with torn scraps and discarded letters, and tying up the rest with bands of tape. All this would stop, once I came into the boudoir, and going to her chair she would take up her work, or sit beside the window; but I was not deceived. Why the sudden desire for making all things straight, unless she was soon to leave the boudoir empty?

It seemed to me the room looked barer than it had before. Trifles were missing. A work-basket that had stood through the spring and winter in one corner, a shawl that had lain over the elbow of a chair, a crayon sketch of the house, presented to her by a caller one winter’s day, that used to be on the mantelpiece—all were there no more. It took me back to my boyhood, before I went away for the first time, to school. Seecombe had made a clearance in the nursery, tying my books in bundles that would go with me, and the rest, that were not favorites, were placed in a separate box for the children on the estate. There were coats I had outgrown, which were sadly worn; and I remember he insisted that I should hand them down to smaller boys less fortunate than I, which I resented. It was as though he took the happy past away from me. Now something of the same atmosphere clung to Rachel’s boudoir. That shawl, had she given it away because she would not need it in a warmer climate? The workbox, was it dismantled, and now reposing at the bottom of a trunk? No sign, as yet, of actual trunks themselves. That would be the final warning. The heavy footsteps in the attic, the boys descending, boxes borne between them, and a kind of dusty cobweb smell, woven about with camphor. Then I would know the worst, and like the dogs with uncanny sense of change, await the end. Another thing was that she started to go out driving in the morning, which she had not done before. She would tell me she had shopping she wished to do, and business at the bank. These things were possible. I should have thought one journey would have settled them. But three mornings in one week followed upon each other, with one day spaced between, and now yet again, in the week that was upon us, twice she had driven into town. The first time it was a morning. The second, afternoon. “You have,” I said to her, “the devil of a lot of shopping of a sudden, and business too…”

“I would have done it all before,” she answered, “but could not do so all the weeks that you were ill.”

“Do you meet anyone as you go about the town?”

“Why, no, not in particular. Yes, now I think of it. I saw Belinda Pascoe and the curate to whom she is engaged. They sent you their respects.”

“But,” I insisted, “you were away all afternoon. Did you buy up all the contents of the drapers?”

“No,” she said. “You are really very curious, and prying. Can I not order the carriage when I please, or do you fear to tire the horses?”

“Drive to Bodmin or to Truro if you please,” I said, “you will find better shopping there, and more to see.”

She did not care for it, then, when I questioned her. Her business must be very personal and private, that she was so reserved.

The next time she ordered the carriage the groom did not go with them. Wellington drove her alone. It seemed that Jimmy had the earache. I had been in the office, and I found him sitting in the stable, nursing his injured ear.

“You must ask the mistress for some oil,” I said to him. “I’m told that is the remedy.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, disconsolate, “she promised to see to it for me, by and by on her return. I think I caught cold in it yesterday. There was a fresh wind blowing on the quay.”

“What were you doing on the quay?” I asked.

“We were waiting a long while for the mistress,” he answered, “so Mr. Wellington thought best to bait the horses in the Rose and Crown, and he let me go off and watch the boats in the harbor.”

“Was the mistress shopping then all afternoon?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he replied, “she didn’t shop at all. She was in the parlor at the Rose and Crown, the same as always.”

I stared at him in disbelief. Rachel in the parlor of the Rose and Crown? Did she sit taking tea with the landlord and his wife? For a moment I thought to question him further, then decided against it. It might be he was speaking out of turn, and would be scolded by Wellington for blabbing. All things were kept from me these days, it seemed. The whole household was in league against me, in a conspiracy of silence. “Well, Jim,” I said, “I hope your ear will soon be better,” and left him in the stable. But here was mystery. Had Rachel grown so desirous of company that she had to seek it in the town inn? Knowing my dislike of visitors, did she hire the parlor for a morning, or an afternoon, and bid people visit her there? I said nothing of the matter, on her return, but merely asked her if she had passed a pleasant afternoon, and she replied she had.

The following day she did not order the carriage. She told me, at luncheon, that she had letters to write, and went up to her boudoir. I said I had to walk to Coombe, to see the farmer there, which was true enough, and so I did. But I went further. Into the town myself. It was a Saturday, and because of the fine weather many folk were out about the streets, people from the neighboring market towns, who did not know me by sight, so that I passed among them unobserved. I saw no one I knew. The “quality,” as Seecombe termed them, never went into the town of an afternoon, and never on a Saturday.

I leaned over the harbor wall, near to the quay, and saw some boys fishing from a boat, getting themselves entangled in their lines. Presently they sculled towards the steps and clambered out. One of them I recognized. It was the lad who helped behind the bar in the Rose and Crown. He had three or four fine bass on a piece of string.

“You’ve done well,” I said. “Are they for supper?”

“Not for me, sir,” he grinned, “they’ll be welcome at the inn though, I’ll be bound.”

“Do you serve bass now with the cider?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “this fish is for the gentleman in the parlor. He had a piece of salmon yesterday, from up the river.”

A gentleman in the parlor. I pulled some silver from my pocket.

“Well,” I said, “I hope he pays you well. Here’s this for luck. Who is your visitor?”

He screwed his face into another grin. “Don’t know his name, sir,” he replied, “Italian, they say he is. From foreign parts.”

And he ran off across the quay, with his fish dangling from the string over his shoulder. I glanced at my watch. It was after three o’clock. No doubt the gentleman from foreign parts would dine at five. I walked through the town, and down the narrow alleyway to the boathouse where Ambrose had kept his sails and gear for the sailing boat he used to use. The small pram was made fast to the frape. I pulled in the pram, and climbed down into it; then paddled out into the harbor and lay off, a little distance from the quay.

There were several fellows pulling to and from the vessels anchored in the channel, to the town steps; and they did not notice me, or if they did cared little, and took me for a fisherman. I threw the weight into the water and rested on my paddles, and watched the entrance of the Rose and Crown. The bar entrance was in the side street. He would not enter that way. If he came at all, it would be by the front. An hour passed. The church clock struck four. Still I waited. At a quarter before five I saw the landlord’s wife come out of the parlor entrance and look about her, as though in search of someone. Her visitor was late for supper. The fish was cooked. I heard her call out to a fellow standing by the boats that were fastened to the steps, but I did not catch her words. He shouted back at her and, turning, pointed out towards the harbor. She nodded her head, and went back inside the inn. Then, ten minutes after five, I saw a boat approaching the town steps. Pulled by a lusty fellow in the bows, the boat itself new varnished, it had all the air of one hired out for strangers, who cared to be rowed about the harbor for their pleasure.

A man, with a broad-brimmed hat upon his head, was seated in the stern. They came to the steps. The man climbed out and gave the fellow money, after slight argument, then turned towards the inn. As he stood for a moment on the steps, before entering the Rose and Crown, he took off his hat and looked about him, with that air of putting a price on all he saw that I could not mistake. I was so near, I could have tossed a biscuit at him. Then he went inside. It was Rainaldi.