I just want to say one thing, which is thank you, Philip, for letting me come.
It can’t have been easy for you.”
She rose then, and crossed over to the window to draw the curtains.
The rain was beating against the panes.
Perhaps I should have drawn the curtains for her, I did not know.
I stood up, awkwardly, in an attempt to do so, but it was too late anyway.
She came back beside the fire, and we both sat down again.
“It was such a strange feeling,” she said, “driving through the park and up to the house, with Seecombe standing by the door to welcome me.
I’ve done it so many times, you know, in fancy.
Everything was just as I had imagined it.
The hall, the library, the pictures on the walls.
The clock struck four as the carriage drove up to the door; I even knew the sound of it.”
I went on pulling at the puppy’s ears.
I did not look at her.
“In the evenings, in Florence,” she said, “last summer and winter before Ambrose became ill, we used to talk about the journey home.
It was his happiest time.
He would tell me about the gardens, and the woods, and the path down to the sea. We always intended to return by the route I came; that’s why I did it.
Genoa, and so to Plymouth.
And the carriage coming there with Wellington to bring us back.
It was good of you to do that, to know how I would feel.”
I felt something of a fool, but found my tongue.
“I fear the drive was rather rough,” I said, “and Seecombe told me you were obliged to stop at the smithy to shoe one of the horses.
I’m sorry about that.”
“It did not worry me,” she said.
“I was quite happy, sitting beside the fire there, watching the work and chatting to Wellington.”
Her manner was quite easy now.
That first nervousness had gone, if it had been nervousness at all. I could not tell.
I found now that if anyone was at fault it was myself, for I felt oddly large and clumsy in so small a room, and the chair in which I was sitting might have been made for a dwarf.
There is nothing so defeating to ease of manner as being uncomfortably seated, and I wondered what sort of a figure I must cut, hunched there in the damnable little chair, with my large feet tucked awkwardly beneath it and my long arms hanging down on either side of it.
“Wellington pointed out to me the entrance to Mr. Kendall’s house,” she said, “and for a moment I wondered if it would be right, and polite, to go and pay him my respects.
But it was late, and the horses had been far, and very selfishly I was longing to be—here.”
She had paused a moment before saying the word “here,” and it came to me that she had been on the point of saying “home” but checked herself.
“Ambrose had described it all so well to me,” she said, “from the entrance hall to every room in the house.
He even sketched them for me, so that today, I well believe, I could find my way blindfold.”
She paused a moment, and then she said,
“It was perceptive of you to let me have these rooms.
They were the ones we meant to use, had we been together.
Ambrose always intended you to have his room, and Seecombe told me you had moved into it.
Ambrose would be glad.”
“I hope you’ll be comfortable,” I said.
“Nobody seems to have been in here since someone called aunt Phoebe.”
“Aunt Phoebe fell lovesick of a curate, and went away to Tonbridge to mend a broken heart,” she said, “but the heart proved stubborn, and aunt Phoebe took a chill that lasted twenty years.
Did you never hear the story?”
“No,” I said, and glanced across at her, under my eyes.
She was looking into the fire, smiling, I suppose at the thought of aunt Phoebe.
Her hands were clasped on her lap in front of her.
I had never seen hands so small before on an adult person.
They were very slender, very narrow, like the hands of someone in a portrait painted by an old master and left unfinished.
“Well,” I said, “what happened to aunt Phoebe?”
“The chill left her, after twenty years, at sight of another curate.