No doubt he will do so, on your return home.”
He knew my godfather was my guardian also, which was more than I did.
Unless he spoke in error.
Surely no man past twenty-one possessed a guardian, and I was twenty-four?
This did not matter, though.
What mattered was Ambrose and his illness, Ambrose and his death.
“These two letters,” I said stubbornly, “are not the letters of a sick man, of a person ill.
They are the letters of a man who has enemies, who is surrounded by people he cannot trust.”
Signor Rainaldi watched me steadily.
“They are the letters of a man who was sick in mind, Mr. Ashley,” he answered me.
“Forgive my bluntness, but I saw him those last weeks, and you did not.
The experience was not a pleasant one for any of us, least of all for his wife.
You see what he says in the first letter there, that she did not leave him.
I can vouchsafe for that.
She did not leave him night or day.
Another woman would have had nuns to tend him. She nursed him alone, she spared herself nothing.”
“Yet it did not help him,” I said.
“Look at the letters, and this last line,
‘She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment…’ What do you make of that, Signor Rainaldi?”
I suppose I had raised my voice in my excitement.
He got up from his chair, and pulled a bell.
When his servant appeared he gave an order, and the man returned with a glass, and some wine and water. He poured some out for me, but I did not want it.
“Well?” I said.
He did not go back to his seat. He went over to the side of the room where books lined the wall and took down a volume.
“Are you any sort of a student of medical history, Mr. Ashley?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You will find it here,” he said, “the sort of information you are seeking, or you can question those doctors, whose address I am only too willing to give you.
There is a particular affliction of the brain, present above all when there is a growth, or tumor, when the sufferer becomes troubled by delusions.
He fancies, for instance, that he is being watched.
That the person nearest to him, such as a wife, has either turned against him, or is unfaithful, or seeks to take his money.
No amount of love or persuasion can allay this suspicion, once it takes hold.
If you don’t believe me, or the doctors here, ask your own countrymen, or read this book.”
How plausible he was, how cold, how confident.
I thought of Ambrose lying on that iron bedstead in the villa Sangalletti, tortured, bewildered, with this man observing him, analyzing his symptoms one by one, watching perhaps from over that threefold screen. Whether he was right or wrong I did not know. All I knew was that I hated Rainaldi.
“Why didn’t she send for me?” I asked.
“If Ambrose had lost faith in her, why not send for me?
I knew him best.”
Rainaldi closed the book with a snap, and replaced it on the shelf.
“You are very young, are you not, Mr. Ashley?” he said.
I stared at him.
I did not know what he meant.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“A woman of feeling does not easily give way,” he said.
“You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will.
In spite of all evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours.
They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender.
We have our wars and battles, Mr. Ashley.
But women can fight too.”
He looked at me, with his cold deep-set eyes, and I knew I had no more to say to him.
“If I had been here,” I said, “he would not have died.”