My Cousin Rachel (16 page)

“Well, he’s not showing it to you,” I replied. “The beacon is my property. There is some old earthwork that belongs to the Pelyn estate. Let him show you that. It’s covered thick in brambles.” And I threw a lump of coal upon the fire, hoping the clatter bothered her.

“I don’t know what’s come over you,” she said; “you are losing your sense of humor.” And she patted me on the shoulder and went upstairs. That was the infuriating thing about a woman. Always the last word. Leaving one to grapple with ill-temper, and she herself serene. A woman, it seemed, was never in the wrong. Or if she was, she twisted the fault to her advantage, making it seem otherwise. She would fling these pinpricks in the air, these hints of moonlight strolls with my godfather, or some other expedition, a visit to Lostwithiel market, and ask me in all seriousness whether she should wear the new bonnet that had come by parcel post from London—the veil had a wider mesh and did not shroud her, and my godfather had told her it became her well. And when I fell to sulking, saying I did not care whether she concealed her features with a mask, her mood soared to serenity yet higher—the conversation was at dinner on the Monday—and while I sat frowning she carried on her talk with Seecombe, making me seem more sulky than I was.

Then in the library afterwards, with no observer present, she would relent; the serenity was with her still, but a kind of tenderness came too. She neither laughed at me for lack of humor, nor chided me for sullenness. She asked me to hold her silks for her, to choose the colors I liked best, because she wanted to work a covering for me to use on the chair in the estate office. And quietly, without irritating, without probing, she asked me questions about my day, whom I had seen, what I had done, so that all sulkiness went from me and I was eased and rested, and I wondered, watching her hands with the silks, smoothing them and touching them, why it could not have been thus in the first place; why first the pinprick, the barb of irritation to disturb the atmosphere, giving herself the trouble to make it calm again? It was as if my change of mood afforded her delight, but why it should do so I had no remote idea. I only knew that when she teased me I disliked it, and it hurt. And when she was tender I was happy and at peace.

By the end of the month the fine weather broke. It rained for three days without stopping, and there was no gardening to be done, no work for me on the estate, riding to and fro to be soaked to the skin, and all callers from the county were kept within their doors, like the rest of us. It was Seecombe who suggested, what I think the pair of us had both been shirking, that the time was opportune to go through Ambrose’s effects. He broached it one morning as my cousin Rachel and I stood by the library window, staring out at the driving rain.

“The office for me,” I had just observed, “and a day in the boudoir for you. What about those boxes down from London? More gowns to sort, and try upon your person, and return again?”

“Not gowns,” she said, “but coverings for curtains. I think Aunt Phoebe’s eye lacked luster. The blue bedroom should live up to its name. At present it is gray, not blue at all. And the quilting to the bed has moth, but don’t tell Seecombe. The moth of years. I have chosen you new curtains and new quilting.”

It was then that Seecombe entered, and seeing us apparently without employment said, “The weather being so inclement, sir, I had thought the boys might be put to extra cleaning within doors. Your room needs attention. But they cannot dust there while Mr. Ashley’s trunks and boxes cover the floor.”

I glanced at her, fearing this lack of tact might wound her, that she might turn away, but to my surprise she took it well.

“You are quite right, Seecombe,” she said; “the boys cannot clean the room until the boxes are unpacked. We have left it far too long. Well, Philip, what about it?”

“Very well,” I said, “if you are agreeable. Let us have the fire lit, and when the room is warm we’ll go upstairs.”

I think that both of us tried to conceal our feelings from the other. We forced a sort of brightness into our behavior and into our conversation. For my sake, she was determined not to show distress. And I, wishing to spare the same for her, assumed a heartiness utterly foreign to my nature. The rain was lashing at the windows of my old room, and a patch of damp had appeared upon the ceiling. The fire, that had not been lit since last winter, burned with a false crackle. The boxes stood in a line upon the floor, waiting to be opened; and on top of one was the well remembered travel rug of dark blue, with the yellow monogram “A.A.” in large letters in one corner. I had the sudden recollection of putting it over his knees that last day, when he drove away.

My cousin Rachel broke the silence. “Come,” she said, “shall we open the clothes trunk first?”

Her voice was purposely hard and practical. I handed her the keys, which she had left in Seecombe’s charge on her arrival.

“Just as you will,” I said.

She put the key in the lock, and turned it, and threw open the lid. His old dressing gown was on the top. I knew it well. It was of heavy silk in a dark red color. His slippers were there too, long and flat. I stood there staring at them, and it was like walking back into the past. I remembered him passing into my room while he was shaving of a morning, the lather on his face. “Look, boy, I’ve been thinking…” Into this room, where we were standing now. Wearing that dressing gown, wearing those slippers. My cousin Rachel took them from the trunk.

“What shall we do with them?” she said, and the voice that had been hard was lower now, subdued.

“I don’t know,” I said; “it’s for you to say.”

“Would you wear them, if I gave them to you?” she asked.

It was strange. I had taken his hat. I had taken his stick. His old shooting coat with the leather at the elbows that he had left behind when he went upon his last journey, that I wore constantly. Yet these things, the dressing gown, the slippers—it was almost as though we had opened up his coffin and looked upon him dead.

“No,” I said, “no, I don’t think so.”

She said nothing. She put them on the bed. She came next to a suit of clothing. A lightweight suit—he must have worn it in hot weather. It was not familiar to me, but she must have known it well. It was creased from lying in the trunk. She took it out and placed it with the dressing gown upon the bed. “It should be pressed,” she said. Suddenly she began lifting the things from the trunk very swiftly and putting them in a pile, one on top of the other, barely touching them.

“I think,” she said, “that if you don’t want them, Philip, the people on the estate here, who loved him, might like to have them. You will know best what to give, and to whom.”

I think she did not see what she was doing. She took them from the trunk in a sort of frenzy, while I stood by and watched her.

“The trunk?” she said. “A trunk is always useful. You could do with the trunk?” She looked up at me, and her voice faltered.

Suddenly she was in my arms, her head against my chest.

“Oh, Philip,” she said, “forgive me. I should have let you and Seecombe do it. I was a fool to come upstairs.”

It was queer. Like holding a child. Like holding a wounded animal. I touched her hair, and put my cheek against her head.

“It’s all right,” I said, “don’t cry. Go back to the library. I can finish it alone.”

“No,” she said, “it’s so weak of me, so stupid. It’s just as bad for you as it is for me. You loved him so…”

I kept moving my lips against her hair. It was a strange feeling. And she was very small, standing there against me.

“I don’t mind,” I said; “a man can do these things. It’s not easy for a woman. Let me do it, Rachel, go downstairs.”

She stood a little way apart and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.

“No,” she said, “I’m better now. It won’t happen again. And I have unpacked the clothes. But if you will give them to the people on the estate, I shall be grateful. And anything you want for yourself, wear it. Never be afraid to wear it. I shan’t mind, I shall be glad.”

The boxes of books were nearer to the fire. I brought a chair and placed it for her, close to the warmth, and knelt beside the other trunks and opened them, one by one.

I hoped she had not noticed—I had barely noticed it myself—that for the first time I had not called her cousin, but Rachel. I don’t know how it happened. I think it must have been because standing there, with my arms about her, she had been so much smaller than myself.

The books did not have the personal touch about them that the clothes had done. There were old favorites that I knew, with which he always traveled, and these she gave to me to keep beside my bed. There were his cuff links, too, his studs, his watch, his pen—all these she pressed upon me, and I was glad of them. Some of the books I did not know at all. She explained them to me, picking up first one volume, then another, and now no longer was the task so sad; this book, she said, he had picked up in Rome, it was a bargain, he was pleased, and that one there, with the old binding, and the other beside it, came from Florence. She described the place where he had bought them, and the old man who had sold them to him, and it seemed, as she chatted to me, that the strain had lifted, it had gone with the tears she had wiped away. We laid the books, one after the other, upon the floor, and I fetched a duster for her and she dusted them. Sometimes she read a passage out to me and told me how this paragraph had pleased Ambrose; or she showed me a picture, an engraving, and I saw her smiling at some well-remembered page.

She came upon a volume of drawings of the layout of gardens. “This will be very useful to us,” she said, and rising from her chair took it to the window to see it better in the light.

I opened another book at random. A piece of paper fell from between the leaves. It had Ambrose’s handwriting upon it. It seemed like the middle scrap of a letter, torn from its context and forgotten.
“It’s a disease, of course, I have often heard of it, like kleptomania or some other malady, and has no doubt been handed down to her from her spendthrift father, Alexander Coryn. How long she has been a victim of it I cannot say, perhaps always; certainly it explains much of what has disturbed me hitherto in all this business. This much I do know, dear boy, that I cannot any longer, nay I dare not, let her have command over my purse, or I shall be ruined, and the estate will suffer. It is imperative that you warn Kendall, if by any chance…”
The sentence broke off. There was no end to it. The scrap of paper was not dated. The handwriting was normal. Just then she came back from the window, and I crumpled the piece of paper in my hand.

“What have you there?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

I threw the piece of paper on the fire. She saw it burn. She saw the handwriting on the paper curl and flicker in the flame.

“That was Ambrose’s writing,” she said. “What was it? Was it a letter?”

“It was just some note he had made,” I said, “on an old scrap of paper.” I felt my face burn in the light of the fire.

Then I reached for another volume from the trunk. She did the same. We continued sorting the books, side by side, together; but the silence had come between us.

We had finished sorting the books by midday. Seecombe sent John up to us, and young Arthur, to know if anything needed carrying downstairs before they went off to their dinner.

“Leave the clothes on the bed, John,” I said, “and put a covering on top of them. I shall want Seecombe to help me make packages of them by and by. Take this pile of books down to the library.”

“And these to the boudoir, Arthur, please,” said my cousin Rachel.

It was her first utterance since I had burned the scrap of paper.

“It will be all right, will it, Philip,” she asked, “if I keep the books on gardens in my room?”

“Why, yes, of course,” I answered. “All the books are yours, you know that.”

“No,” she said, “no, Ambrose would have wanted the others in the library.” She stood up, and smoothed her dress, and gave John the duster.

“Some cold luncheon is laid below, madam,” he said.

“Thank you, John. I am not hungry.”

I hesitated, standing by the open door, after the boys had disappeared carrying the books.

“Will you not come down to the library,” I asked, “and help me put away the books?”

“I think not,” she said, then paused a moment, as if to add something, but did not do so. Then she walked along the corridor to her room.

I ate my lunch alone, staring out of the dining room windows. It was still raining fast. No use attempting to go out of doors, there was nothing to be done. I had better finish the task of sorting the clothes, with Seecombe to help me. It would please him to be asked advice. What should go to the Barton, what to Trenant, what to the East Lodge; everything to be carefully chosen so that no one should take offense at what he had. It would employ the pair of us all afternoon. I tried to keep my mind upon the business; yet, nagging like a pain in the tooth that flares up suddenly and dies again, my thoughts would be wrenched back to the scrap of paper. What had it been doing between the pages of that book, and how long had it lain there, torn, forgotten? Six months, a year, or longer? Had Ambrose started upon a letter to me which never reached its destination; or were there other bits of paper, part of the same letter, which for some unknown reason were still lying between the pages of a book? The letter must have been written before his illness. The writing was firm and clear. Therefore last winter, last autumn possibly… I was swept by a kind of shame. What business was it of mine to probe back into that past, to wonder about a letter that had never reached me? It was not my affair. I wished to heaven I had not come upon it.

All afternoon Seecombe and I sorted the clothes, and he put them into packages while I wrote notes of explanation to go with them. He suggested that the parcels should be given out at Christmas, which seemed to me a sound idea, and one that would appeal to the tenants. When we had finished I went downstairs again to the library, and put the books into the shelves. I found myself shaking the leaves of each volume, before I placed it on the shelf; and as I did so I felt furtive, like someone guilty of a petty crime.

“… a disease, of course, like kleptomania, or some other malady…”
Why did I have to remember those words? What did Ambrose mean?

I reached for a dictionary, and looked up kleptomania. “An irresistible tendency to theft in persons not tempted to do it by needy circumstances.” That was not his accusation. His accusation was one of prodigality, of extravagance. How could extravagance be a malady? It was totally unlike Ambrose, the most generous of men, to accuse anyone of such a habit. As I put the dictionary back upon the shelf the door opened, and my cousin Rachel came into the room.

I felt as guilty as if she had caught me in deceit. “I have just finished putting away the books,” I said, and I wondered if my voice sounded as false to her as it did to me.

“So I see,” she answered, and she went and sat down by the fire. She was ready changed for dinner. I had not realized it was so late.

“We have sorted the clothes,” I said. “Seecombe was very helpful. We think it a good plan, if you approve, that the things should be given out at Christmas.”

“Yes,” she said, “so he told me just now. I think it most appropriate.”

I did not know if it was my manner, or hers, but there was a kind of constraint between us.

“It hasn’t ceased raining for the day,” I said.

“No,” she answered.

I glanced at my hands, dusty from the books. “If you will excuse me,” I said, “I will go and wash, and change for dinner.” I went upstairs, and dressed, and when I came down again dinner was upon the table. We took our places in silence. Seecombe, from long habit, would break in upon our conversation very often, at dinnertime, when he had something that he wished to say, and tonight, when we had nearly finished, he said to my cousin Rachel, “Have you shown Mr. Philip the new coverings, madam?”

“No, Seecombe,” she answered, “there hasn’t yet been time. But if he cares to see them I can do so after dinner. Perhaps John would carry them down to the library.”

“Coverings?” I said, puzzled. “What covers are they?”

“Don’t you remember?” she answered. “I told you I had ordered coverings for the blue bedroom. Seecombe has seen them, and is very much impressed.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “yes, I remember now.”

“I have seen nothing like them in my life, sir,” said Seecombe, “certainly no mansion in these parts has any furnishings to touch them.”

“Ah, but then the stuff is imported from Italy, Seecombe,” said my cousin Rachel. “There is only one place in London where it is procurable. I was told of it in Florence. Would you like to see the coverings, Philip, or does it not interest you?”

She put the question to me half hopefully, half anxiously, as though wishing for my opinion, yet fearing I should be bored.

I don’t know how it was, but I felt myself go scarlet. “Why, yes,” I said, “I shall be pleased to look at them.”

We rose from dinner and went into the library. Seecombe followed us, and in a moment or two he and John brought down the coverings and spread them out.

Seecombe was right. There could be no other furnishings like these in Cornwall. I had seen none like them anywhere, either in Oxford or in London. There were many of them. Rich brocades, and heavy silken hangings. They were the kind of stuffs you might see in a museum.

“There is quality for you, sir,” said Seecombe. His voice was hushed. He might have been in church.

“I thought this blue for the bed-hangings,” said my cousin Rachel, “and the deeper blue and gold for the curtains, and the quilting for the coverlet. What do you say, Philip?”

She looked up at me, anxiously. I did not know how to answer her.

“Do you not like them?” she said to me.

“I like them very much,” I said, “but”—I felt myself go red again—“are they not very dear?”

“Oh, yes, they are dear,” she answered, “any stuff like this is dear, but it will last for years, Philip. Why, your grandson, and great grandson, will be able to sleep in the blue bedroom, with these coverings upon the bed and these hangings for the curtains. Isn’t that so, Seecombe?”

“Yes, madam,” said Seecombe.

“The only thing that matters is whether you like them, Philip,” she asked again.

“Why yes,” I said, “who could help but like them?”

“Then they are yours,” she told me, “they are a present to you, from me. Take them away, Seecombe. I will write to the place in London in the morning and say we will keep them.”

Seecombe and John folded the coverings and took them from the room. I had the feeling that her eyes were upon me, and rather than meet them I took out my pipe and lit it, taking longer over the job than usual.

“Something’s the matter,” she said. “What is it?”

I was not sure how to answer her. I did not want to hurt her.

“You should not give me a present like that,” I said awkwardly, “it will cost you far too much.”

“But I want to give them to you,” she said, “you have done so much for me. It’s such a little gift to give, in return.”

Her voice was soft and pleading, and when I glanced up at her there was quite a wounded look about her eyes.

“It’s very sweet of you,” I said, “but I don’t think you should do it, all the same.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” she answered, “and I know, when you see the room finished, you will be pleased.”

I felt wretched, and uncomfortable; not that she should wish to give me a present, which was generous of her and impulsive, and which I would have accepted without thought had it been yesterday. But this evening, since I had read that infernal scrap of letter, I was haunted by the doubt that what she wanted to do for me might turn in some way to her disadvantage; and that in giving way to her I was giving way to something that I did not fully understand.

Presently she said to me, “That book of gardens is going to be very helpful for our planning here. I had forgotten I had given it to Ambrose. You must look at the engravings. Of course they are not right for this place, but certain features would work in well. A terraced walk, for instance, looking down to the sea across the fields, and on the other side of it a sunken water garden—as they have in one of the villas in Rome where I used to stay. There’s an engraving of it in the book. I know just the spot for it, where that old wall used to stand.”

I hardly know how I did it, but I found myself asking her, in a voice at once casual and offhand, “Have you always lived in Italy, since you were born?”

“Yes,” she answered, “did Ambrose never tell you? My mother’s people came from Rome, and my father Alexander Coryn was one of those men who find it difficult to settle anywhere. He never could bear England, I think he did not get on very well with his family here, in Cornwall. He liked the life in Rome, and he and my mother suited each other well. But they led a precarious sort of existence, never any money, you know. I was used to it as a child, but as I grew up it was most unsettling.”

“Are they both dead?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, my father died when I was sixteen. Mother and I were alone for five years. Until I married Cosimo Sangalletti. Five fearful years they were too, moving from city to city, not always certain where our next meal would come from. Mine was not a sheltered girlhood, Philip. I was thinking only last Sunday how different from Louise.”

So she had been twenty-one when she married first. The same age as Louise. I wondered how they had lived, she and her mother, until she met Sangalletti. Perhaps they had given lessons in Italian, as she had suggested doing here. Perhaps that was what had made her think of it.

“My mother was very beautiful,” she said, “quite different from me, except for coloring. Tall, almost massive. And like many women of her type she went suddenly to pieces, lost her looks, grew fat and careless; I was glad my father did not live to see it. I was glad he did not live to see many things she did, or myself either, for that matter.”

Her voice was matter-of-fact and simple, she spoke without bitterness; yet I thought, looking at her there as she sat by my library fire, how little of her I really knew, and how little of that past life of hers I would ever know. She had called Louise sheltered, which was true. And I thought suddenly that the same held good for me. Here I was, twenty-four, and apart from the conventional years at Harrow and Oxford I knew nothing of the world but my own five hundred acres. When a person like my cousin Rachel moved from one place to another, left one home for a second, and then a third; married once, then twice; how did it feel? Did she shut the past behind her like a door and never think of it again, or was she beset with memories from day to day?

“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 cushion 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.”