“They take their tisana here after dinner,” he continued, “day after day, always the same.”
He paused, and touched the chair with his hand.
A sense of oppression grew upon me.
It was cool in the quadrangle, cold almost as a grave, and yet the air was stagnant like the shuttered rooms before he opened them.
I thought of Ambrose as he had been at home.
He would walk about the grounds in summer time without a coat, an old straw hat upon his head against the sun.
I could see the hat now, tilted forward over his face, and I could see him, his shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow, standing in his boat, pointing at something far away at sea.
I remembered how he would reach down with his long arms, and pull me into the boat when I swam alongside.
“Yes,” said the man, as though speaking to himself, “the signor Ashley sat in the chair here, looking at the water.”
The woman came back and, crossing the quadrangle, turned the handle.
The dripping ceased.
The bronze boy looked down at an empty shell. Everything was silent, still.
The child, who had stared with round eyes at the fountain, bent suddenly to the ground and began grubbing among the paving stones, picking up the laburnum pods in his small hands and throwing them into the pool.
The woman scolded him, pushing him back against the wall, and seizing a broom that stood there began to sweep the court.
Her action broke the stillness, and her husband touched my arm.
“Do you wish to see the room where the signore died?” he said softly.
Possessed with the same sense of unreality, I followed him up the wide stairway to the landing above.
We passed through rooms more sparsely furnished than the apartments below, and one, looking northwards over the avenue of cypress trees, was plain and bare like a monk’s cell.
A simple iron bedstead was pushed against the wall.
There was a pitcher, a ewer, and a screen beside the bed.
Tapestries hung over the fireplace, and in a niche in the wall was the small statuette of a kneeling madonna, her hands clasped in prayer.
I looked at the bed. The blankets were folded neatly at the foot. Two pillows, stripped of their linen, were placed on top of one another at the head.
“The end,” said the man in a hushed voice, “was very sudden, you understand.
He was weak, yes, very weak from the fever, but even the day before he had dragged himself down to sit by the fountain.
No, no, said the contessa, you will become more ill, you must rest, but he is very obstinate, he will not listen to her.
And there is coming and going all the time with the doctors.
Signor Rainaldi, he is here too, talking, persuading, but never will he listen, he shouts, he is violent, and then, like a little child, falls silent.
It was pitiful, to see a strong man so.
Then, in the early morning, the contessa she comes quickly to my room, calling for me.
I was sleeping in the house, signore.
She says, her face white as the wall there,
‘He is dying, Giuseppe, I know it, he is dying,’ and I follow her to his room, and there he is lying in bed, his eyes closed, breathing still, but heavily, you understand, not a true sleep.
We send away for the doctor, but the signor Ashley he never wakes again, it was the coma, the sleep of death.
I myself lit the candles with the contessa, and when the nuns had been I came to look at him.
The violence had all gone, he had a peaceful face.
I wish you could have seen it, signore.”
Tears stood in the fellow’s eyes.
I looked away from him, back to the empty bed.
Somehow I felt nothing.
The numbness had passed away, leaving me cold and hard.
“What do you mean,” I said, “by violence?”
“The violence that came with the fever,” said the man.
“Twice, three times I had to hold him down in bed, after his attacks.
And with the violence came the weakness inside, here.”
He pressed his hand against his stomach.
“He suffered much with pain.
And when the pain went he would be dazed and heavy, his mind wandering.
I tell you, signore, it was pitiful.
Pitiful, to see so large a man helpless.”
I turned away from that bare room like an empty tomb, and I heard the man close the shutters once again, and close the door.