A lie would serve as an excuse, and I gave it her.
“I have always known there must be one,” I answered, “but possibly it was left unsigned, and so invalid, from a legal point of view.
I go even further, and suggest you have it here among your things.”
This was a shot at venture, but it told.
Her eyes flashed instinctively towards the little bureau, against the wall, then back to me.
“What are you trying to make me say?” she asked.
“Only confirm that it exists,” I said.
She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders.
“Very well, yes,” she replied, “but it alters nothing.
The will was never signed.”
“Can I see it?” I asked. “For what purpose, Philip?” “For a purpose of my own. I think you can trust me.”
She looked at me a long while.
She was clearly bewildered, and I think anxious too.
She rose from her chair and went towards the bureau, then, hesitant, glanced back at me again.
“Why suddenly all this?” she said.
“Why can’t we leave the past alone?
You promised we should do so, that evening in the library.”
“You promised you would stay,” I answered her.
To give it me or not, the choice was hers.
I thought of the choice that I had made that afternoon beside the granite slab.
I had chosen, for better or for worse, to read the letter.
Now she must come to a decision too.
She went to the bureau, and, taking a small key, opened up a drawer.
Out of the drawer she took a piece of paper, and gave it to me.
“Read it, if you wish,” she said. I took the paper to the candlelight.
The writing was in Ambrose’s hand, clear and firm, a stronger hand than in the letter I had read that afternoon.
The date was November, of a year ago, when he and Rachel had been married seven months.
The paper was headed
“Last Will and Testament of Ambrose Ashley.”
The contents were just as he had told me.
The property was left to Rachel, for her lifetime, passing at her death to the eldest of any children that might be born to both of them, and failing the birth of children, then to me, with the proviso that I should have the running of the same while she should live.
“May I make a copy of this?” I said to her.
“Do what you want,” she said.
She looked pale and listless, as if she did not care.
“It’s over and done with, Philip, there is no sense in talking of it now.”
“I will keep it for the moment, and make a copy of it too,” I said, and sitting at the bureau I took pen and paper and did so, while she lay in her chair, her cheek resting in her hand.
I knew that I must have confirmation of everything that Ambrose had told me in his letter, and though I hated every word I had to say I forced myself to question her.
I scratched away with the pen: copying the will was more a pretext than anything else, and served its purpose so that I did not have to look at her.
“I see that Ambrose dated this November,” I said.
“Have you any idea why he should choose that month to make a new will?
You were married the preceding April.”
Her answer was slow in coming; and I thought suddenly how a surgeon must feel, when he probes about the scar of a wound but lately healed.
“I don’t know why he wrote it in November,” she said.
“We were neither of us thinking of death at that time.
Rather the reverse.
It was the happiest time of all the eighteen months we were together.”
“Yes,” I said, seizing a fresh piece of paper, “he wrote and told me of it.” I heard her move in her chair, and turn to look at me. But I went on writing at the bureau.
“Ambrose told you?” she said.
“But I asked him not to, I feared you might misunderstand and feel, in some way, slighted; it would be very natural if you had.
He promised to keep it secret.