This evening you surely could not take exception to anything he said?
If only you could be less difficult, less jealous…”
She drew the curtains of my room, for dusk was nearly come.
Even in her gesture, the way she touched the curtain, there was impatience.
“Are you going to sit there, hunched in that chair, till midnight?” she asked.
“If so, put a wrap about you, or you will take cold.
For my part, I am exhausted and shall go to bed.”
She touched my head, and went.
Not a caress.
The quick gesture of someone patting a child who has misbehaved, the adult finding herself too lost in tedium to continue scolding, but brushing the whole aside.
“There… there… For heaven’s sake, have done.”
That night fever returned to me again.
Not with the old force, but something similar.
Whether it was chill or not, caught from sitting in the boat in the harbor twenty-four hours before, I do not know, but in the morning I was too giddy to stand upright upon the floor, and fell to retching and to shuddering, and was obliged to go back to bed again.
The doctor was sent for, and with my aching head I wondered if the whole miserable business of my illness was to set in with repetition.
He pronounced my liver out of order, and left medicine.
But when Rachel came to sit with me, in the afternoon, it seemed to me she had upon her face that same expression of the night before, a kind of weariness.
I could imagine the thought within her,
“It is going to start again?
Am I doomed to sit here as a nurse to all eternity?”
She was more brusque with me, as she handed me my medicine; and when later I was thirsty, and wished to drink, I did not ask her for the glass, for fear of giving trouble.
She had a book in her hands, which she did not read, and her presence in the chair beside me seemed to hold a mute reproach.
“If you have other things to do,” I said at last, “don’t sit with me.”
“What else do you suppose I have to do?” she answered.
“You might wish to see Rainaldi.”
“He has gone,” she said.
My heart was the lighter for the news.
I was almost well.
“He has returned to London?” I inquired.
“No,” she answered, “he sailed from Plymouth yesterday.”
My relief was so intense that I had to turn away my head lest I showed it in my face, and so increased her irritation.
“I thought he had business still to do in England?”
“So he had; but we decided it could be done just as well by correspondence.
Matters of greater urgency attended him at home.
He had news of a vessel due to sail at midnight, and so went.
Now are you satisfied?”
Rainaldi had left the country, I was satisfied with that.
But not with the pronoun “we”; nor that she spoke of home.
I knew why he had gone—to warn the servants at the villa to make ready for their mistress.
There was the urgency attending him.
My sands were running out.
“When will you follow him?”
“It depends on you,” she answered.
I supposed, if I wished, I could continue to feel ill.
Complain of pain, and make excuse of sickness.
Drag on, pretending, for a few weeks more.
And then?
The boxes packed, the boudoir bare, her bed in the blue room covered with the dust-sheet that had been upon it all the years before she came, and silence.
“If,” she sighed, “you would only be less bitter and less cruel, these last days could be happy.”
Was I bitter?