I rose from my chair and went towards the door.
Once again Rainaldi pulled the bell, and the servant came to show me out.
“I have written,” he said, “to your guardian, Mr. Kendall.
I have explained to him very fully, in great detail, everything that has happened.
Is there anything more I can do for you?
Will you be staying long in Florence?”
“No,” I said, “why should I stay?
There is nothing to keep me.”
“If you wish to see the grave,” he said, “I will give you a note to the guardian, in the Protestant cemetery.
The site is quite simple and plain. No stone as yet, of course.
That will be erected presently.”
He turned to the table, and scribbled a note which he gave me.
“What will be written on the stone?” I said.
He paused a moment, as though reflecting, while the servant waiting by the open door handed me Ambrose’s hat.
“I believe,” he said, “that my instructions were to put
‘In Memory of Ambrose Ashley, beloved husband of Rachel Coryn Ashley,’ and then of course the date.”
I knew then that I did not want to go to the cemetery or visit the grave.
That I had no wish to see the place where they had buried him.
They could put up the stone, and later take flowers there if they wished, but Ambrose would never know, and never care.
He would be with me in that west country, under his own soil, in his own land.
“When Mrs. Ashley returns,” I said slowly, “tell her that I came to Florence. That I went to the villa Sangalletti, and that I saw where Ambrose died.
You can tell her too about the letters Ambrose wrote to me.”
He held out his hand to me, cold and hard like himself, and still he watched me with those veiled, deep-set eyes.
“Your cousin Rachel is a woman of impulse,” he said.
“When she left Florence she took all her possessions with her.
I very much fear that she will never return.”
I left the house and went out into the dark street.
It was almost as if his eyes still followed me from behind his shuttered windows.
I walked back along the cobbled streets and crossed the bridge, and before turning into the hostelry to seek what sleep I could before the morning I went and stood once more beside the Arno.
The city slept.
I was the only loiterer.
Even the solemn bells were silent, and the only sound was the river, sucking its way under the bridge.
It ran more swiftly now, it seemed, than in the day, as though the water had been pent up and idle during the long hours of heat and sun and now, because of night, because of silence, found release.
I stared down at the river, watching it surge and flow and lose itself in the darkness, and by the single flickering lantern light upon the bridge I saw the bubbles forming, frothy brown.
Then borne upon the current, stiff and slowly turning, with its four legs in the air, came the body of a dog. It passed under the bridge and went its way.
I made a vow there, to myself, beside the Arno.
I swore that, whatever it had cost Ambrose in pain and suffering before he died, I would return it, in full measure, upon the woman who had caused it.
Because I did not believe Rainaldi’s story.
I believed in the truth of those two letters that I held in my right hand.
The last Ambrose had ever written to me.
Someday, somehow, I would repay my cousin Rachel.
6
I arrived home the first week in September.
The news had preceded me—the Italian had not lied when he told me he had written to Nick Kendall.
My godfather had broken the news to the servants and to the tenants on the estate.
Wellington was waiting for me at Bodmin with the carriage.
The horses were decked in crepe, as were Wellington and the groom, their faces long and solemn.
My relief at being back in my own country was so great that for the moment grief was dormant, or possibly that long homeward trek across Europe had dulled all feeling; but I remember my first instinct was to smile at sight of Wellington and the boy, to pat the horses, to inquire if all was well. It was almost as though I were a lad again, returned from school.
The old coachman’s manner was stiff, however, with a new formality, and the young groom opened the carriage door to me with deference.
“A sad homecoming, Mr. Philip,” said Wellington, and when I asked after Seecombe and the household he shook his head and told me that they and all the tenants were sorely grieved.