And then, as it turned out, it made no odds.”
The voice was flat, without expression.
Perhaps, after all, when a surgeon probed a scar the sufferer would say dully that he felt no pain.
In the letter, buried beneath the granite, Ambrose had said, “With a woman, these things go deeper.”
As I scratched upon the piece of paper I saw that I had written the words,
“It made no odds… it made no odds.” I tore up the piece of paper, and began afresh.
“And finally,” I said, “in the long run, the will was never signed.”
“No,” she said,
“Ambrose left it as you see it now.”
I had done with writing.
I folded the will and the copy I had made, and put both of them in my breast pocket, where earlier in the afternoon I had carried his letter.
Then I went and knelt beside her chair, and putting my arms about her held her fast; not as I would a woman, but as a child.
“Rachel,” I said, “why did not Ambrose sign the will?”
She lay quite still, and did not move away.
Only the hand that rested on my shoulder tightened suddenly.
“Tell me,” I said, “tell me, Rachel.”
The voice that answered me was faint and far away, not more than a whisper in my ear.
“I never knew,” she said; “we did not speak of it again.
But I think when he realized that I could not, after all, have children, he lost belief in me.
Some sort of faith went, though he never knew it.”
As I knelt there, with my arms about her, I thought of the letter in the pocketbook beneath the granite slab, with this same accusation said in other words, and I wondered how it could be that two people who had loved could yet have such a misconception of each other and, with a common grief, grow far apart.
There must be something in the nature of love between a man and a woman that drove them to torment and suspicion.
“You were unhappy then?” I asked.
“Unhappy?” she said.
“What do you suppose?
I was almost out of my mind.”
And I could see them sitting on the terrace of the villa, with this strange shadow between them, built out of nothing but their own doubts and fears, and it seemed to me that the seeds of this same shadow went back beyond all reckoning and could never more be traced.
Perhaps, unconscious of his grudge, he brooded about her past with Sangalletti and before, blaming her for the life he had not shared, and she, with resentment likewise, feared loss of love must go with loss of child-bearing.
How little she had understood of Ambrose after all.
And what small knowledge he had had of her.
I might tell her of the contents of the letter under the slab, but it would do no good.
The misunderstanding went too deep.
“So it was all through error that the will was never signed, and put aside?” I said to her.
“Call it error if you like,” she answered, “it cannot matter now.
But soon afterwards, his manner altered and he himself changed.
Those headaches, almost blinding him, began.
They drove him near to violence, once or twice.
I wondered how much could be my fault, and was afraid.”
“And you had no friend?”
“Only Rainaldi.
And he never knew what I have told you tonight.”
That cold hard face, those narrow searching eyes, I did not blame Ambrose for mistrusting him.
Yet how could Ambrose, who was her husband, have been so uncertain of himself?
Surely a man must know when a woman loved him?
Yet possibly one could not always tell.
“And when Ambrose fell ill,” I said, “you no longer asked Rainaldi to the house?”
“I dared not,” she said.
“You will never understand how Ambrose became, and I don’t want to tell you.
Please, Philip, you must not ask me anymore.”
“Ambrose suspected you—of what?”