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.
25
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.