“When, how long ago?”
“I have been home a little under three weeks,” I said.
“I went there and returned through France.
I spent one night in Florence only.
The night of the fifteenth of August.”
“The fifteenth of August?”
I heard the new inflection in her voice, I saw her eyes flash back in memory.
“But I had only left for Genoa the day before. It isn’t possible.”
“It is both possible and true,” I said; “it happened.”
The embroidery had fallen from her hands, and that strange look, almost of apprehension, came back into her eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.
“Why have you let me stay here in the house, four-and-twenty hours, and never breathed a word of it?
Last night, you should have told me last night.”
“I thought you knew,” I said.
“I had asked my godfather to write it in his letter.
Anyway, there it is.
You know now.”
Some coward streak in me hoped that we could let the matter rest, that she would pick up the embroidery once again. But it was not to be.
“You went to the villa,” she said, as though talking to herself.
“Giuseppe must have let you in.
He would open up the gates and see you standing there, and he would think…” She broke off, a cloud came over her eyes, she looked away from me to the fire.
“I want you to tell me what happened, Philip,” she said.
I put my hand in my pocket. I felt the letters there.
“I had not heard from Ambrose in a long while,” I said, “not since Easter, or perhaps Whitsun—I don’t recall the date, but I have all his letters upstairs.
I grew worried.
And the weeks went by.
Then, in July, the letter came.
Only a page.
Unlike himself, a sort of scrawl.
I showed it to my godfather, Nick Kendall, and he agreed that I should start at once for Florence, which I did within a day or two.
As I left another letter came, a few sentences only.
I have both these letters in my pocket now.
Do you want to see them?”
She did not answer immediately.
She had turned back from the fire and was looking at me once again.
There was something of compulsion in those eyes, neither forceful nor commanding, but strangely deep, strangely tender, as if she had the power to read and understand my reluctance to continue, knowing the reason for it, and so urged me on.
“Not just yet,” she said, “afterwards.”
I shifted my gaze from her eyes down to her hands.
They were clasped in front of her, small and very still.
It was easier to speak somehow if I did not look directly at her, but at her hands.
“I arrived in Florence,” I said, “I hired a carrozza and drove to your villa.
The servant, the woman, opened the gate, and I asked for Ambrose.
She seemed frightened and called to her husband.
He came, and then he told me Ambrose was dead and you had gone away.
He showed me the villa.
I saw the room where he had died.
Just before I left the woman opened a chest and gave me Ambrose’s hat.
It was the only thing you had forgotten to take with you.”
I paused, and went on looking at the hands.
The right fingers were touching the ring on the left hand.