Perhaps that’s what I was, and am.
The trouble is that I have never known anyone or loved anyone in the world but Ambrose.”
Now I was thinking aloud, not caring what she thought of me.
I was putting things into words I had not acknowledged to myself before.
“Was not that his trouble too?” she said.
“How do you mean?”
She took her hand off Don’s head, and cupping her chin in her hands, her elbows on her knee, she stared into the fire.
“You are only twenty-four, Philip,” she said, “you have all your life before you, many years probably of happiness, married no doubt, with a wife you love, and children of your own.
Your love for Ambrose will never grow less, but it will slip back into place where it belongs.
The love of any son for any father.
It was not so for him.
Marriage came too late.”
I knelt on one knee before the fire and lit my pipe.
I did not think to ask permission.
I knew she did not mind.
“Why too late?” I asked.
“He was forty-three,” she said, “when he came out to Florence just two years ago, and I saw him for the first time.
You know how he looked, how he spoke, his ways, his smile.
It was your life since babyhood.
But you would not know the effect it had upon a woman whose life had not been happy, who had known men—very different.”
I said nothing, but I think I understood.
“I don’t know why he turned to me, but he did,” she said.
“Those things can never be explained, they happen.
Why this man should love that woman, what queer chemical mix-up in our blood draws us to one another, who can tell?
To me, lonely, anxious, and a survivor of too many emotional shipwrecks, he came almost as a savior, as an answer to prayer.
To be strong as he was, and tender too, lacking all personal conceit, I had not met with that.
It was a revelation.
I know what he was to me.
But I to him…”
She paused, and drawing her brows together, frowned into the fire.
Once again her fingers played with the ring on her left hand.
“He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world,” she said, “all the beauty of it, and the sadness too.
The hunger and the thirst.
Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified themselves into one person who by chance, or fate, call it what you will, happened to be me.
Rainaldi—whom he detested by the way, as you probably did too—told me once that Ambrose had woken to me just as some men wake to religion.
He became obsessed, in the same fashion.
But a man who gets religion can go into a monastery and pray all day before Our Lady on an altar.
She is made of plaster anyway, and does not change.
Women are not so, Philip.
Their moods vary with the days and nights, sometimes even with the hours, just as a man’s can do.
We are human, that is our failing.”
I did not understand what she meant about religion.
I could only think of old Isaiah, down at St. Blazey, who turned Methodist and went about bareheaded preaching in the lanes.
He called upon Jehovah, and said he and all of us were miserable sinners in the eyes of the Lord, and we must go knocking at the gates of a new Jerusalem.
I did not see how this state of things applied to Ambrose.
Catholics were different, of course.
She must mean that Ambrose had thought of her like a graven image in the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them.
“You mean,” I said, “that he expected too much of you?
He put you on a sort of pedestal?”