I rose from my chair and walked across the room.
“It’s no use,” I said.
“Ambrose always told me I would make a rotten soldier.
I can’t shoot in cold blood.
Please go upstairs, or anywhere but here.
My mother died before I can remember, and I have never seen a woman cry.”
I opened the door for her.
But she went on sitting there by the fire, she did not move.
“Cousin Rachel, go upstairs,” I said.
I don’t know how my voice sounded, whether it was harsh, or loud, but old Don, lying on the floor, lifted his head and looked up at me, fixing me in his old-wise doggy fashion, and then stretching himself, and yawning, went and laid his head on her feet, beside the fire.
Then she moved.
She put down her hand and touched his head.
I shut the door and came back to the hearth.
I took the two letters and threw them in the fire.
“That’s no use either,” she said, “when we both of us remember what he said.”
“I can forget,” I said, “if you will too.
There’s something clean about a fire.
Nothing remains.
Ashes don’t count.”
“If you were a little older,” she said, “or your life had been different, if you were anyone but yourself and had not loved him quite so much, I could talk to you about those letters, and about Ambrose.
I won’t, though; I would rather you condemned me.
It makes it easier in the long run for both of us.
If you will let me stay until Monday I will go away after that, and you need never think about me again.
Although you did not intend it to be so, last night and today were deeply happy.
Bless you, Philip.”
I stirred the fire with my foot, and the embers fell.
“I don’t condemn you,” I said.
“Nothing has worked out as I thought or planned.
I can’t go on hating a woman who doesn’t exist.”
“But I do exist.”
“You are not the woman I hated.
There’s no more to it than that.”
She went on stroking Don’s head, and now he lifted it and leaned it against her knee.
“This woman,” she said, “that you pictured in your mind. Did she take shape when you read the letters, or before?”
I thought about it for a moment. Then I let it all come, with a rush of words.
Why hold back anything to rot?
“Before,” I said slowly.
“In a sense I was relieved when the letters came.
They gave me a reason for hating you.
Up till then there was nothing I could go upon, and I was ashamed.”
“Why were you ashamed?”
“Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.”
“You were jealous…”
“Yes.
I can say it now, oddly enough.
Right from the start, when he wrote and told me he was married.
Perhaps even before there may have been a sort of shadow, I don’t know.
Everyone expected me to be as delighted as they were themselves, and it wasn’t possible.
It must sound highly emotional and absurd to you that I should have been jealous.
Like a spoiled child.