Too often now I find her eyes upon me, watchful and strange.
And when I hold her, it is as though she were afraid.
Afraid of what, of whom?
“Two days ago, which brings me to the reason for this letter, I had another attack of this same fever, which laid me low in March.
The onset is sudden.
I am seized with pain and sickness, which passes swiftly to great excitation of my brain, driving me near to violence, and I can hardly stand upon my feet for dizziness of mind and body.
This, in its turn, passes, and an intolerable desire for sleep comes upon me, so that I fall upon the floor, or upon my bed, with no power over my limbs.
I do not recollect my father being thus.
The headaches, yes, and some difficulty of temperament, but not the other symptoms.
“Philip, my boy, the only being in the world whom I can trust, tell me what it means, and if you can, come out to me.
Say nothing to Nick Kendall.
Say no word to any single soul.
Above all, write not a word in answer, only come.
“One thought possesses me, leaving me no peace.
Are they trying to poison me?—AMBROSE.”
This time I did not put the letter back into the pocketbook.
I tore it piece by piece into tiny shreds, and ground the shreds into the earth with my heel.
Each shred was scattered, and then ground, in a separate place. The pocketbook, soggy from its sojourn in the earth, I was able to wrench in two with a single twist. I flung each half over my shoulder, and they fell among the bracken.
Then I walked home.
It seemed like a postscript to the letter, that when I entered the hall Seecombe was just bringing in the postbag, that the boy had fetched from town.
He waited while I unlocked it, and there, amid the few there were for me, was one to Rachel, with the Plymouth mark upon it.
I needed but to glance at the thin spidery hand to know that it was from Rainaldi.
I think, if Seecombe had not been there, I would have kept it.
As it was, there was nothing for it but to give it him to take up to Rachel.
It was ironic, too, that when I went up to her a little later, saying nothing of my walk or where I had been, all her sharpness with me seemed to have gone.
The old tenderness had returned.
She held out her arms to me, and smiled, and asked me how I felt and if I was rested.
She said nothing of the letter she had received.
I wondered, during dinner, whether the news it had contained had made her happy; and, as I sat eating, I pictured to myself the framework of his letter, what he had said to her, how he addressed her—if, in short, it were a letter of love.
It would be written in Italian.
But here and there, though, there might be words I should understand.
She had taught me a few phrases.
I would know, at any rate, with the first words, the relationship they bore to one another.
“You are very silent. Are you well?” she said.
“Yes,” I answered, “I am well,” and flushed, lest she should read my mind and guess what I meant to do.
After dinner we went up to her boudoir.
She prepared the tisana, as usual, and set it down in its cup on the table by my side, and hers as well.
On the bureau lay Rainaldi’s letter, half covered by her handkerchief.
My eyes were drawn towards it, fascinated.
Would an Italian, writing to the woman he loved, keep to formality?
Or setting sail from Plymouth, with the prospect of a few weeks’ separation, and having dined well, drunk his brandy and smoked his cigar, and smiling in complaisance, would he turn to indiscretion and permit himself the license of spilling love on paper?
“Philip,” said Rachel, “you keep your eyes fixed on one corner of the room as though you saw a ghost.
What is the matter?”
“I tell you nothing,” I said.
And for the first time lied, as I knelt beside her pretending an urgency of longing and of love, so that her questions might be stilled, and that she would forget the letter lying on the desk and leave it there.
Late that night, long after midnight, when I knew she slept—for standing in her room with a lighted candle I looked down on her and saw that it was so—I went back into the boudoir.
The handkerchief was still there, the letter gone.
I looked in the fire, no ashes in the grate.
I opened the drawers of the bureau, and there were her papers all in order, but not the letter.
It was not in the pigeonholes, nor the little drawers beside it.