I have no pride about that sort of thing.
What I could not bear was when you said my doing so would reflect badly upon Ambrose.”
“It was true,” I said, “but forget it now.
We need not think of it again.”
“It was dear of you, and very like you,” she said, “to go riding over to Pelyn to see your guardian.
I must have seemed so ungracious, so completely lacking in gratitude.
I can’t forgive myself.”
The voice, so near to tears again, did something to me.
A kind of tightness came to my throat and to my belly.
“I would much rather that you hit me,” I told her, “than that you cried.”
I heard her move in her bed, and feel for a handkerchief and blow her nose.
The gesture and the sound, so commonplace and simple, happening there in the darkness behind the curtains, made me even weaker in the belly than before.
Presently she said,
“I will take the allowance, Philip, but I must not trespass on your hospitality after this week.
I think next Monday, if it will suit you, I should leave here and move elsewhere, perhaps to London.”
A blank feeling came over me at her words.
“Go to London?” I said.
“But why?
What for?”
“I only came for a few days,” she answered. “I have already stayed longer than I intended.”
“But you have not met everybody yet,” I said, “you have not done everything you are supposed to do.”
“Does it matter?” she said.
“After all—it seems so pointless.” How unlike her it sounded, that lack of spirit in her voice.
“I thought you liked it,” I said, “going about the estate, and visiting the tenants.
Each day we went about it together you seemed so happy. And today, putting in those shrubs with Tamlyn.
Was it all show, and were you just being polite?”
She did not answer for a moment, and then she said,
“Sometimes, Philip, I think you lack all understanding.”
Probably I did.
I felt sullen and hurt and I did not care.
“All right,” I said; “if you want to go, do so.
It will cause a lot of talk, but no matter.”
“I should have thought,” she said, “that it would cause more talk if I stayed.”
“Talk if you stayed?” I said.
“What do you mean?
Don’t you realize that by rights you belong here, that if Ambrose had not been such a lunatic this would have been your home?”
“Oh, God,” she flared out at me in sudden anger, “why else do you think I came?”
I had put my foot in it again.
Blundering and tactless, I had said all the wrong things.
I felt suddenly hopeless and inadequate.
I went up to the bed, and pulled aside the curtains, and looked down at her.
She was lying propped against her pillows, her hands clasped in front of her.
She was wearing something white, frilled at the neck like a choirboy’s surplice, and her hair was loose, tied behind with a piece of ribbon, as I remembered Louise’s as a child.
It shook me, and surprised me, that she should look so young.
“Listen,” I said,
“I don’t know why you came, or what were your motives in doing all you have done.
I don’t know anything about you, or about any woman.
All I know is that I like it now you are here.
And I don’t want you to go.
Is that complicated?”