And you by that time, no doubt, with grown sons of your own.
Rachel and myself, old people in wheeled chairs.” He laughed, and smiled at me again.
“And how is the charming Miss Louise?” he said to me.
I told him I believed that she was well.
I watched him smoking his cigar, and thought how smooth his hands were for a man.
They had a kind of feminine quality that did not fit in with the rest of him, and the great ring, on his little finger, was out of place.
“When do you go back to Florence?” I asked him.
He flicked the ash that had fallen on his coat down to the grate.
“It depends on Rachel,” he said.
“I return to London to settle my business there, and then shall either go home ahead of her, to prepare the villa and the servants for her reception, or wait and travel with her.
You know, of course, that she intends to go?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“I am relieved that you have not put any pressure upon her to remain,” he said.
“I quite understand, that with your illness you became greatly dependent on her; she told me as much.
And she has been anxious to spare your feelings in every way.
But, as I explained to her, this cousin of yours is now a man, and not a child.
If he cannot stand upon his own feet, he must learn to do so.
Am I not right?” he asked me.
“Perfectly.”
“Women, especially Rachel, act always from emotion.
We men, more usually though not always so, with reason.
I am glad to see you sensible.
Perhaps in spring, when you visit us in Florence, you will allow me to show you some of the treasures there.
You will not be disappointed.”
He blew another cloud of smoke up to the ceiling.
“When you say ‘we,’ ” I ventured, “do you use it in the royal sense, as if you owned the city, or is it a legal phrase?”
“Forgive me,” he said, “but I am so accustomed to acting for Rachel, even to thinking for her, in so many ways, that I can never entirely dissociate myself from her and so fall to using that particular pronoun personal.”
He looked across at me.
“In time,” he said, “I have good reason to believe that I shall come to use it in a sense more intimate.
But that”—he gestured, his cigar in hand—“is in the laps of the gods.
Ah, here she comes.”
He stood up, and so did I, when Rachel came into the room; and as she gave her hand to him, which he took and kissed, she made him welcome in Italian.
Perhaps it was watching them at dinner, I do not know—his eyes, that never left her face, her smile, her change of manner with him—but I felt, rising within me, a sort of nausea.
The food I ate tasted of dust.
Even the tisana, which she made for the three of us to drink when dinner was over, had a bitter unaccustomed tang.
I left them, sitting in the garden, and went up to my room.
As soon as I had gone I heard their voices break into Italian.
I sat in the chair by my window, where I had sat during those first days and weeks of convalescence, and she beside me; and it was as though the whole world had turned evil, and of a sudden, sour.
I could not bring myself to descend and say good night to him.
I heard the carriage come, I heard the carriage drive away.
I went on sitting in my chair.
Presently Rachel came up and tapped upon my door.
I did not answer.
She opened it, and entering the room came to my side, and put her hand upon my shoulder.
“What is it now?” she asked.
There was a sort of sigh about her voice, as if she had reached the limit of endurance.
“He could not have been more courteous, or kind,” she said to me.
“What fault was there tonight?”
“None,” I answered.
“He speaks so well of you to me,” she said, “if you could only hear him, you would realize that he has a great regard for you.