I stumbled out of the blue bedroom with my candlestick, light-headed and somehow dazed, as though I had drunk brandy, and it seemed to me that the advantage I had thought to have over her, as I stood above her and she lay on her pillows, was now completely lost.
The last word, and the last gesture too, had been with her.
The little girl look and the choirboy surplice had misled me.
She was a woman all the time.
For all that, I was happy.
The misunderstanding was now over, and she had promised to remain.
There had been no more tears.
Instead of going immediately to bed I went down to the library once again, to write a line to my godfather and to reassure him that all had gone off well.
He need never know of the troublous evening spent by the pair of us.
I scribbled my letter, and went into the hall to place it in the postbag for the morning.
Seecombe had left the bag for me, as was his custom, upon the table in the hall, with the key beside it.
When I opened up the bag two other letters fell into my hand, both written by my cousin Rachel.
One was addressed to my godfather Nick Kendall, as she had told me. The second letter was addressed to Signor Rainaldi in Florence.
I stared at it a moment, then put it back with the other in the postbag.
It was foolish of me, perhaps, senseless and absurd; the man was her friend, why should she not write a letter to him?
Yet, as I went upstairs to bed, I felt exactly as if she had hit me after all.
14
The following day when she came downstairs, and I joined her in the garden, my cousin Rachel was as happy and unconcerned as though there had never been a rift between us.
The only difference in her manner to me was that she seemed more gentle, and more tender; she teased me less, laughed with me and not at me, and kept asking my opinion as to the planting of the shrubs, not for the sake of my knowledge but for my future pleasure when I should look upon them.
“Do what you want to do,” I told her; “bid the men cut the hedgerows, fell the trees, heap up the banks yonder with shrubs, whatever you fancy will do well, I have no eye for line.”
“But I want the result to please you, Philip,” she said.
“All this belongs to you, and one day will belong to your children.
What if I make changes in the grounds, and when it is done you are displeased?”
“I shan’t be displeased,” I said; “and stop talking about my children.
I am quite resolved to remain a bachelor.”
“Which is essentially selfish,” she said, “and very stupid of you.”
“I think not,” I answered.
“I think by remaining a bachelor I shall be spared much distress and anxiety of mind.”
“Have you ever thought what you would lose?” “I have a shrewd guess,” I told her, “that the blessings of married bliss are not all they are claimed to be.
If it’s warmth and comfort that a man wants, and something beautiful to look upon, he can get all that from his own house, if he loves it well.”
To my astonishment she laughed so much at my remark that Tamlyn and the gardeners, working at the far end of the plantation, raised their heads to look at us.
“One day,” she said to me, “when you fall in love, I shall remind you of those words.
Warmth and comfort from stone walls, at twenty-four.
Oh, Philip!”
And the bubble of laughter came from her again.
I could not see that it was so very funny.
“I know quite well what you mean,” I said; “it just happens that I have never been moved that way.”
“That’s very evident,” she said.
“You must be a heartbreak to the neighborhood.
That poor Louise…”
But I was not going to be led into a discussion on Louise, nor again a dissertation upon love and matrimony.
I was much more interested to watch her work upon the garden.
October set in fine and mild, and for the first three weeks of it we had barely no rain at all, so that Tamlyn and the men, under the supervision of my cousin Rachel, were able to go far ahead with the work in the plantation.
We managed also to visit in succession all the tenants upon the estate, which gave great satisfaction, as I knew it would.
I had known every one of them since boyhood, and had been used to calling in upon them every so often, for it was part of my work to do so.
But it was a new experience for my cousin Rachel, brought up in Italy to a very different life.
Her manner with the people could not have been more right or proper, and it was a fascination to watch her with them.
The blend of graciousness and cameraderie made them immediately look up to her, yet put them at their ease.
She asked all the right questions, replied with the right answers.
Also—and this endeared her to many of them—there was the understanding she seemed to have of all their ailments, and the remedies she produced.