The man watched me, in sympathy, and said something to his wife, who dragged forward a stool, and he placed it beside me.
“Sit, signore,” he said.
“I am sorry.
So very sorry.”
I shook my head.
I could not speak.
There was nothing I could say.
The man, distressed, spoke roughly to his wife to relieve his feelings. Then he turned again to me.
“Signore,” he said, “if you would like to go to the villa I will open it for you.
You can see where the signor Ashley died.”
I did not care where I went or what I did.
My mind was still too numbed to concentrate.
He began to walk up the drive, drawing some keys from his pocket, and I walked beside him, my legs heavy suddenly, like lead.
The woman and the child followed behind us.
The cypress trees closed in upon us, and the shuttered villa, like a sepulcher, waited at the further end.
As we drew closer I saw that it was large, with many windows, all of them blank and closed, and before the entrance the drive swept in a circle, for carriages to turn.
Statues, on their pedestals, stood between the shrouded cypresses.
The man opened the huge door with his key, and motioned me inside.
The woman and the child came too, and the pair of them began to fling open the shutters, letting the daylight into the silent hall.
They went before me, passing from room to room, opening the shutters as they did so, believing, in the goodness of their hearts, that by doing this they somehow eased my pain.
The rooms all led into each other, large and sparse, with frescoed ceilings and stone floors, and the air was heavy with a medieval musty smell.
In some of the rooms the walls were plain, in others tapestried, and in one, darker and more oppressive than the rest, there was a long refectory table flanked with carved monastic chairs, and great wrought iron candlesticks stood on either end.
“The villa Sangalletti very beautiful, signore, very old,” said the man.
“The signor Ashley, this is where he would sit, when the sun was too strong for him outside.
This was his chair.”
He pointed, almost with reverence, to a tall high-backed chair beside the table.
I watched him in a dream.
None of this held reality.
I could not see Ambrose in this house, or in this room.
He could never have walked here with familiar tread, whistling, talking, throwing his stick down beside this chair, this table.
Relentlessly, monotonously, the pair went round the room, throwing wide the shutters.
Outside was a little court, a sort of cloistered quadrangle, open to the sky but shaded from the sun.
In the center of the court stood a fountain, and the bronze statue of a boy, holding a shell in his two hands.
Beyond the fountain a laburnum tree grew between the paving stones, making its own canopy of shade.
The golden flowers had long since drooped and died, and now the pods lay scattered on the ground, dusty and gray.
The man whispered to the woman, and she went to a corner of the quadrangle and turned a handle.
Slowly, gently, the water trickled from the shell between the bronze boy’s hands. It fell down and splashed into the pool beneath.
“The signor Ashley,” said the man, “he sat here every day, watching the fountain.
He liked to see the water.
He sat there, under the tree.
It is very beautiful, in spring.
The contessa, she would call down to him from her room above.”
He pointed to the stone columns of the balustrade.
The woman disappeared within the house, and after a moment or two appeared on the balcony where he had pointed, throwing open the shutters of the room.
The water went on dripping from the shell. Never fast, never flowing, just splashing softly into the little pool.
“In summer, always they sit here,” went on the man, “signor Ashley and the contessa.
They take their meals, they hear the fountain play.
I wait upon them, you understand.
I bring out two trays and set them here, on this table.”
He pointed to the stone table and two chairs that stood there still.