My Cousin Rachel (19 page)

“I did not think that you would fall so low as to listen to travelers’ tales,” I said to him. “Who are these people, anyway? How dare they have the mischief to repeat gossip of over ten years past? They would not dare to do so before my cousin Rachel.”

“Never mind that now,” he replied. “My concern now is with those pearls. I am sorry, but as your guardian for another three months I must ask you to desire her to return the collar. I will have it placed in the bank again, with the rest of the jewelry.”

Now it was my turn to pace the floor. I hardly knew what I did.

“Return the collar?” I said. “But how can I possibly ask her to do that? I gave it to her, tonight, as a Christmas present. It is the last thing in the whole world that I could do.”

“Then I must do it for you,” he answered.

I suddenly hated his stiff stubborn face, his rigid way of standing, his stolid indifference to all feeling.

“I’ll be damned if you will,” I said to him.

I wished him a thousand miles away. I wished him dead.

“Come, Philip,” he said, altering his tone, “you are very young, very impressionable, and I quite understand that you wanted to give your cousin some token of esteem. But family jewels are rather more than that.”

“She has a right to them,” I said. “God knows if anyone has a right to wear the jewels it is she.”

“Had Ambrose lived, yes,” he answered, “but not now. Those jewels remain in trust for your wife, Philip, when you marry. And that’s another thing. That collar has a significance of its own, which some of the older among the tenants at dinner tonight may remark upon. An Ashley, on his marriage, allows his bride to wear the collar on her wedding day, as sole adornment. That is the kind of family superstition which the people about here delight in, and, as I have told you, the older among them know the tale. It is unfortunate, and the sort of thing that causes gossip. I am sure that Mrs. Ashley, in her situation, is the last person to wish that.”

“The people here tonight,” I said impatiently, “will think, if they were in a state to think at all, that the collar is my cousin’s own possession. I have never heard such rubbish in my life, that her wearing of it might cause gossip.”

“That,” he said, “is not for me to say. I shall doubtless know only too soon if there is talk. One thing I must be firm upon, Philip. And that is, that the collar is returned to the safety of the bank. It is not yet yours to give, and you had no right whatsoever to go to the bank, without my permission, and bring it from safe custody. I repeat, if you will not ask Mrs. Ashley to return it, I shall.”

In the intensity of our discussion we had not heard the rustle of the gowns upon the stairs. Now it was too late. Rachel, followed by Louise, stood in the doorway.

She stood there, her head turned towards my godfather, who was planted in the center of the drawing room, confronting me.

“I am sorry,” she said, “I could not help but overhear what you have said. Please, I don’t want either of you to embarrass yourselves on my account. It was dear of Philip to let me wear the pearls tonight, and quite right, Mr. Kendall, of you to ask for their return. Here they are.” She raised her hands and unfastened them from her neck.

“No,” I said, “why the devil should you do so?”

“Please, Philip,” she said.

She took off the collar and gave it to my godfather. He had the grace to look uncomfortable, yet relieved too.

I saw Louise look at me with pity. I turned away.

“Thank you, Mrs. Ashley,” said my godfather in his gruff way. “You understand that this collar is really part of the estate trust, and Philip had no business to take it from the bank. It was a foolish, thoughtless action. But young men are headstrong.”

“I perfectly understand,” she said, “let us say no more about it. Do you need wrapping for it?”

“Thank you, no,” he answered, “my handkerchief will do.”

He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and placed the collar in the middle of it, with great care.

“And now,” he said, “I think that Louise and I will say good night. Thank you for a delightful and successful dinner, Philip, and I wish you both a happy Christmas.”

I did not answer. I went out into the hall, and stood by the front door, and handed Louise into the carriage without a word. She pressed my hand in sign of sympathy, but I was too much moved to answer her. My godfather climbed in beside her, and they went away.

I walked slowly back to the drawing room. Rachel was standing there, gazing down into the fire. Her neck seemed naked without the collar. I stood looking at her without speaking, angry, miserable. At sight of me she put out her arms and I went to her. My heart was too full to speak. I felt like a little lad of ten years old, and it would not have taken much to make me cry.

“No,” she said, her voice tender with the warmth that was so much part of her, “you must not mind. Please, Philip, please. I am so proud to have worn it for that once.”

“I wanted you to wear it,” I said, “I wanted you to keep it always. God damn him, and send him to hell.”

“Hush,” she said, “dear, don’t say those things.”

I was so bitter and angry I could have ridden to the bank upon the instant, and gone to the vaults, and brought back every piece of jewelry there, every stone, every gem, and given them to her, and all the gold and silver in the bank as well. I could have given her the world.

“Well, it’s spoiled now,” I said, “the whole evening, the whole of Christmas. Everything is wasted.”

She held me close, and laughed. “You are like a child,” she said, “running to me with empty hands. Poor Philip.” I stood away, and looked down upon her.

“I am no child,” I said, “I am five-and-twenty years, all but three blasted months. My mother wore those pearls on her wedding day, and before that my aunt, and before that my grandmother. Don’t you realize why I wanted you to wear them too?”

She put her hands on my shoulders, and kissed me once again.

“Why, yes,” she answered, “that was why I was so happy, and so proud. You wanted me to wear them because you knew that had I been married here, and not in Florence, Ambrose would have given them to me on our wedding day.”

I said nothing. She had told me, some weeks back, that I lacked perception. Tonight, I might have said the same of her. A few moments later, she patted me on the shoulder, and went upstairs to bed.

I felt in my pocket for the gold chain she had given me. That, if nothing else, was mine alone.

Our Christmas was a happy one. She saw to that. We rode to the farms on the estate, and to the cottages and lodges, and distributed the clothes that had belonged to Ambrose. And under each roof we were obliged to eat a pie, or taste a pudding, so that when evening came again we were too full to sit ourselves to dinner, but, surfeited, left the servants to finish all the remaining geese and turkey of the night before, while she and I roasted chestnuts before the drawing room fire.

Then, as though I had gone back in time some twenty years, she bade me shut my eyes, and, laughing, went up to her boudoir and came down again and put into my hands a little tree. This she had dressed in gay fantastic fashion, with presents wrapped in brightly colored paper, each present an absurdity; and I knew she did this for me because she wanted me to forget the drama of Christmas Eve and the fiasco of the pearls. I could not forget. Nor could I forgive. And from Christmas onwards a coolness came between my godfather and myself. That he should have listened to petty lying gossip was bad enough, but even more I resented his sticking to the quibble in the will which left me under his jurisdiction for three more months. What if Rachel had spent more than we had foreseen? We had not known her needs. Neither Ambrose nor my godfather had understood the way of life in Florence. Extravagant she well might be, but was it so great a crime? As to society there, we could not judge it. My godfather had lived all his life in careful niggardly fashion, and, because Ambrose had never bothered to spend much upon himself, my godfather had taken it for granted that this state of things would continue once the property was mine. My wants were few, and I had no more desire for personal spending than had Ambrose, in his time, but this cheeseparing on the part of my godfather induced in me a sort of fury that made me determined to have my way and use the money that was mine.

He had accused Rachel of frittering away her allowance. Well, he could accuse me of wanton waste about my house. I decided, after the New Year, that I wished to make improvements to the property that would be mine. But not only to the gardens. The terracing of the walk above the Barton fields proceeded, also the hollowing away and preparation of the ground beside it that was to become the sunken water-garden, copied from the engraving in Rachel’s book.

I was determined to repair the house as well. Too long, I considered, we had made do with the monthly visitations of Nat Dunn, the estate mason, who crept from ladder to ladder upon the roof and replaced slates, swept off by a gale of wind, smoking his pipe up there the while, his back against a chimney. Now was the time to set the whole roof in order, have new tiles, new slates, new guttering, strengthening also those walls damaged by long years of wind and rain. Too little had been done about the place since the old days, two hundred years ago, when the men of Parliament had wrought such havoc, and my ancestors had been hard put to it to keep the house from falling into ruin. I would make amends for past neglect, and if my godfather pulled a face and drew sums upon his blotter he could go hang himself.

So I went my own way about the business, and before January was out some fifteen to twenty men were working on my roof, or about the building, and inside the house as well, decorating ceilings and walls to my orders. It gave me the greatest satisfaction to picture my godfather’s expression when the bills for the work should be submitted to him.

I made the repairs about the house serve as an excuse for not entertaining visitors, thereby putting an end, for the time being, to Sunday dinner. Therefore I was spared the regular visit of the Pascoes and the Kendalls, and saw nothing of my godfather, which was part of my intention. I also had Seecombe spread it, in his jungle fashion, below stairs, that Mrs. Ashley found it difficult to receive callers at the moment, owing to there being workmen in the drawing room. We lived therefore, during those days of winter and early spring, in hermit fashion, greatly to my liking. Aunt Phoebe’s boudoir, as Rachel would still insist in naming it, became our place of habitation. There, at the close of day, Rachel would sit, and sew or read, and I would watch her. A new gentleness had come to her manner, since the incident of the pearls on Christmas Eve, which, though warming beyond belief, was sometimes hard to bear.

I think she had no knowledge what it did to me. Those hands, resting for a moment on my shoulder, or touching my head in a caress, as she passed by the chair where I was sitting, talking all the while about the garden or some practical matter, would set my heart beating so that it would not be stilled. To watch her move was a delight, and sometimes I even wondered if she rose from her chair on purpose, to go to the window, to reach upwards to the curtain, to stand there with her hand upon it looking outwards onto the lawn, because she knew my eyes were watching her. She said my name Philip in a manner quite her own. To others, it had always been a short, clipped word, with some emphasis on the final letter, but she lingered on the “l” slowly, deliberately, in a way that somehow, to my ear, gave it a new sound I liked well. As a lad I had always wished to be called Ambrose, and the wish had remained with me, I think, until the present. Now I was glad that my name went back even farther into the past than his had done. When the men brought the new lead piping to be placed against the walls, to serve as guttering from the roof to the ground, and the bucket heads were in position, I had a strange feeling of pride as I looked up at the little plaque beneath them stamped with my initials P. A and the date beneath, and lower down the lion that was my mother’s crest. It was as though I gave something of myself into the future. And Rachel, standing beside me, took my arm and said, “I never thought you proud, Philip, until now. I love you the better for it.”

Yes, I was proud… but emptiness went with it all the same.

So the work proceeded, in the house and in the grounds; and the first days of spring came, being in themselves a blend of torment and delight. Blackbird and chaffinch sang beneath our windows on first waking, rousing both Rachel and myself from sleep. We talked of it at midday when we met. The sun came to her first, on the eastern side of the house, and with her windows wide drove a slant of light onto her pillow. I had it later, as I dressed. Leaning out, looking over the meadows to the sea, I would see the horses and the plow climb the further hill, with the gulls wheeling about them, and in the pasture lands closer to the house were the ewes and the young lambs, back to back for comfort. Lapwings, on passage bent, came in a little cloud, with fluttering wings. Soon they would pair, and the male soar and tumble in his flight of rapture. Down on the shore the curlews whistled, and the oyster-catchers, black and white like parsons, poked in the seaweed solemnly, for breakfast. The air had a zest to it, salt-tasting, under the sun.

It was on a morning such as this that Seecombe came to me and told me that Sam Bate, up at the East Lodge, who was in bed, poorly, wished very much that I would go and see him, as he had something of importance to give me. He inferred that whatever it was he had was too precious to deliver to his son or to his daughter. I thought little of it. It is always a pleasure among country folk to make much mystery over small matters. Nevertheless, in the afternoon, I walked up the avenue to the gates there where the four roads meet, and turned in at the lodge to have a word with him. Sam was sitting up in bed, and lying on the blanket before him was one of the coats that had belonged to Ambrose, which had been given to him on Christmas Day. I recognized it as the light-colored one I had not known, which Ambrose must have bought for the hot weather on the continent.

“Well, Sam,” I said, “I am sorry to find you in bed. What is the matter?”

“The same old cough, Mr. Philip, sir, that catches me aback every spring,” replied the man. “My father had it before me, and one spring t’will carry me to the grave, the same as it did him.”

“Nonsense, Sam,” I told him, “those are old tales they spread, that what a man’s father had will kill the son.”

Sam Bate shook his head. “There’s truth in it, sir,” he said, “and you know it, too. How about Mr. Ambrose and his father, the old gentleman your uncle? Brain sickness did for the pair of them. There’s no going agin the ways of nature. I’ve seen the same in cattle.”

I said nothing, wondering, at the same time, how Sam should know what illness it was of which Ambrose had died. I had told no one. It was incredible how rumor spread about our countryside.

“You must send your daughter to ask Mrs. Ashley for some cordial to cure your cough,” I said to him. “She has great knowledge of such things. Oil of eucalyptus is one of her remedies.”

“I will, Mr. Philip, I will,” he answered me, “but first I felt it right to ask you to come yourself, concerning the matter of the letter.”

He lowered his voice, and looked suitably concerned and solemn.

“What letter, Sam?” I asked.

“Mr. Philip,” he replied, “on Christmas Day, you and Mrs. Ambrose kindly gave some of us clothes and the like belonging to the late master. And very proud we are, all of us, to have the same. Now this coat that you see here, on the bed, was given to me.” He paused, and touched the coat, with some of the same awe about him still with which he had received it on Christmas Day. “Now I brought the coat up here, sir, that same night,” Sam continued, “and I said to my daughter if we had a glass case to put it in we’d do so, but she told me to get along with such nonsense, the coat was meant to wear, but wear it I would not, Mr. Philip. T’would have seemed presuming on my part, if you follow me, sir. So I put the coat away in the press, yonder, and took him out now and agin and had a look at it. Then, when this cough seized me, and I lay up here abed, I don’t know how it was, but the fancy came upon me to wear the coat. Just sitting up in bed, like, as you see me now. The coat being lightish weight, and easy on my back. Which I did, Mr. Philip, for the first time yesterday. It was then I found the letter.”

He paused, and, fumbling under his pillow, drew forth a packet. “What had happened, Mr. Philip, was this,” he said. “The letter must have slipped down inside the material of the coat and the lining. T’wouldn’t have been noticed in the folding of it, or in packing. Only by someone such as me smoothing the coat with my hands for wonder at having it around me. I felt the crackling of it, and made so bold as to open up the lining with a knife. And here it is, sir. A letter, plain as day. Sealed, and addressed to you by Mr. Ambrose himself. I know his hand, of old. It shook me, sir, to come upon it. It seemed, if you understand, as though I had come upon a message from the dead.”

He gave the letter to me. Yes, he was right. It was addressed to me, and by Ambrose. I looked down at the familiar handwriting, and felt a sudden wrench at my heart.

“That was wise of you, Sam, to act as you have done,” I said, “and very proper to send for me in person. Thank you.”

“No thanks, Mr. Philip, no thanks at all,” he answered, “but I thought how maybe that letter had laid there all these months, and should have been in your hands a long time since. But the poor master being dead, made it so wisht, to come upon it. And the same to you on reading it, maybe. And so I thought it best to tell you of it myself, rather than send my daughter to the mansion.”

I thanked him again, and after putting the letter away in my breast pocket talked for a few minutes or so, before I left him. Some intuition, I don’t know what it was, made me tell him to say nothing of the business to anyone, not even to his daughter. The reason I gave him was the same that he had given me, respect for the dead. He promised, and I left the lodge.

I did not return at once to the house. I climbed up through the woods to a path that runs above that part of the estate, bordering the Trenant acres and the wooded avenue. Ambrose had been fonder of this walk than any other. It was our highest point of land, saving the beacon to the south, and had a fine view over the woods and the valley to the open sea. The trees fringing the path, planted by Ambrose and his father before him, gave shelter, although not high enough as yet to dim the view, and in May month the bluebells made a cover to the ground. At the end of the path, topping the woods, before plunging to descent and the keeper’s cottage in the gully, Ambrose had set up a piece of granite. “This,” he said to me, half joking, half in earnest, “can serve me for tombstone when I die. Think of me here, rather than in the family vault with the other Ashleys.”

He little thought, when he had it put in place, that he would not lie in the family vault ever, but in the Protestant cemetery, in Florence. Upon the slab of granite he had scrolled some mention of the lands where he had traveled, and a line of doggerel at the end to make us laugh when we looked at it together. For all the nonsense, though, I believe his heart intended it; and during that last winter, when he was from home, I had often climbed the path up through the woods to stand beside the granite stone, and look down upon the prospect that he loved so well.

When I came to it today I stood for a moment with my hands upon the slab, and I could not bring myself to a decision. Below me the smoke curled from the keeper’s cottage, and his dog, left upon a chain while he was absent, barked now and again, at nothing, or maybe because the sound of his own yelps gave him company. The glory of the day had gone, and it was colder. Clouds had come across the sky. In the distance I could see the cattle coming down from the Lankelly hills to water in the marshes under the woods, and beyond the marshes, in the bay, the sea had lost the sun and was slatey gray. A little wind blew shoreward, rustling the trees below me.

I sat down beside the slab, and taking Ambrose’s letter from my pocket placed it face downwards, on my knee. The red seal stared up at me, imprinted with his ring and the chough’s head. The packet was not thick. It contained nothing. Nothing but a letter, which I did not want to open. I cannot say what misgiving held me back, what cowardly instinct drove me to hide my head like an ostrich in the sand. Ambrose was dead, and the past went with him when he died. I had my own life to make, and my own will to follow. It might be that in this letter there would be some further mention of that other matter I had chosen to forget. If Ambrose had accused Rachel of extravagance, he could now use the same epithet, with more reason perhaps, to me. I should have dispensed more upon the house itself in a few months than he had done in years. I did not feel it was betrayal.