It was the same with all the rest.
Even Seecombe took me to task.
“You don’t seem to pick up as you should, Mr. Philip,” he said.
“We were talking of it, in the steward’s room, last evening.
‘What’s come to the master?’ Tamlyn said to me.
‘He’s whisht as a ghost on Hallowe’en, and looks at nothing.’
I would advise marsala in the morning.
There is nothing like a wineglass of marsala to restore the blood.”
“Tell Tamlyn,” I said to Seecombe, “to go about his business.
I am perfectly well.”
The routine of Sunday dinner, with the Pascoes and the Kendalls, had not yet been restored, which was a mercy.
I think poor Mary Pascoe had returned to the rectory, after I fell ill, with tales that I was mad.
I saw her look at me askance, in church, the first morning that I went when I was well; and the whole family eyed me with a sort of pity, inquiring for me with low voices and averted gaze.
My godfather came to see me, also Louise.
They too assumed an unaccustomed manner, a blend of cheerfulness and sympathy, suited to a child who had been sick; and I felt they had been warned not to touch upon any subject that might cause me concern.
The four of us sat like strangers in the drawing room.
My godfather, I thought, is ill at ease, and wishing he had not come, but feels it to be his duty to call upon me; while Louise, with some odd instinct possessed by women, knows what has happened here and shrinks at thought of it.
Rachel, as always, was in command of the situation, and kept the tenor of the conversation on the level that was required.
The county Show, the betrothal of the second Pascoe daughter, the warmth of the present weather, the prospect of a change in Government—all these were easy matters. But what if we spoke the things we really thought?
“Get out of England soon, before you destroy yourself and this boy with you,” thus my godfather.
“You love her more than ever.
I can see it, by your eyes,” from Louise.
“I must prevent them from making Philip anxious, at all costs,” so Rachel.
And myself,
“Leave me alone with her, and go…”
Instead, we clung to courtesy, and lied.
Each one of us breathed the easier at the termination of the visit, and as I watched them drive to the park gates, no doubt thankful to be away, I wished I could erect a fence about the property, as in the old enchanted tales of childhood, to keep away all callers, and disaster too.
It seemed to me, though she said nothing, that she planned the first steps towards departure.
I would find her, of an evening, sorting through her books, arranging them as people do who wish to make a choice between the volumes they take with them and those they leave behind.
Another time she would be sitting at the bureau, putting her papers into order, filling the wastepaper basket with torn scraps and discarded letters, and tying up the rest with bands of tape.
All this would stop, once I came into the boudoir, and going to her chair she would take up her work, or sit beside the window; but I was not deceived.
Why the sudden desire for making all things straight, unless she was soon to leave the boudoir empty?
It seemed to me the room looked barer than it had before.
Trifles were missing.
A work-basket that had stood through the spring and winter in one corner, a shawl that had lain over the elbow of a chair, a crayon sketch of the house, presented to her by a caller one winter’s day, that used to be on the mantelpiece—all were there no more.
It took me back to my boyhood, before I went away for the first time, to school.
Seecombe had made a clearance in the nursery, tying my books in bundles that would go with me, and the rest, that were not favorites, were placed in a separate box for the children on the estate.
There were coats I had outgrown, which were sadly worn; and I remember he insisted that I should hand them down to smaller boys less fortunate than I, which I resented.
It was as though he took the happy past away from me.
Now something of the same atmosphere clung to Rachel’s boudoir.
That shawl, had she given it away because she would not need it in a warmer climate?
The workbox, was it dismantled, and now reposing at the bottom of a trunk?
No sign, as yet, of actual trunks themselves.
That would be the final warning.
The heavy footsteps in the attic, the boys descending, boxes borne between them, and a kind of dusty cobweb smell, woven about with camphor.
Then I would know the worst, and like the dogs with uncanny sense of change, await the end.
Another thing was that she started to go out driving in the morning, which she had not done before.
She would tell me she had shopping she wished to do, and business at the bank.
These things were possible.
I should have thought one journey would have settled them.