If anything so presumptuous was passing through the old man’s mind I was damned if I would continue inviting him to Sunday dinner.
Yet to break the invitation would be to break the routine of years.
It was not possible.
Therefore I must continue as we had always done, but the next Sunday, when my godfather on the right of my cousin Rachel bent his deaf ear to her, and suddenly sat back, laughing and saying,
“Oh, capital, capital,” I wondered sulkily what it portended and why it was that they laughed so much together.
This, I thought to myself, is another trick of women, to throw a jest in the air that left a sting behind it.
She sat there, at Sunday dinner, looking remarkably well and in high good humor, with my godfather on her right and the vicar on her left, none of them at a loss for conversation, and for no good reason I turned sulky and silent, just as Louise had done that first Sunday, and our end of the table had all the appearance of a Quaker meeting.
Louise sat looking at her plate, and I at mine, and I suddenly lifted my eyes and saw Belinda Pascoe, with round eyes, gaping at me; and remembering the gossip of the countryside I became more dumb than ever.
Our silence spurred my cousin Rachel to greater effort, in order, I suppose, to cover it; and she and my godfather and the vicar tried to cap each other, quoting verse, while I became more and more sulky, and thankful for the absence of Mrs. Pascoe through indisposition.
Louise did not matter.
I was not obliged to talk to Louise.
But when they had all gone my cousin Rachel took me to task.
“When,” she said, “I entertain your friends, I look to have a little support from you.
What was wrong, Philip?
You sat there scowling, with a mulish face, and never addressed a word to either neighbor.
Those poor girls…” And she shook her head at me, displeased.
“There was so much gaiety at your end,” I answered her, “that I saw no point in contributing to it.
All that nonsense about
‘I love you’ in Greek.
And the vicar telling you that ‘my heart’s delight’ sounded very well in Hebrew.”
“Well, so it did,” she said.
“It came rolling off his tongue, and I was most impressed.
And your godfather wants to show me the beacon head by moonlight.
Once seen, he tells me, never forgotten.”
“Well, he’s not showing it to you,” I replied.
“The beacon is my property.
There is some old earthwork that belongs to the Pelyn estate.
Let him show you that.
It’s covered thick in brambles.”
And I threw a lump of coal upon the fire, hoping the clatter bothered her.
“I don’t know what’s come over you,” she said; “you are losing your sense of humor.”
And she patted me on the shoulder and went upstairs.
That was the infuriating thing about a woman.
Always the last word.
Leaving one to grapple with ill-temper, and she herself serene.
A woman, it seemed, was never in the wrong.
Or if she was, she twisted the fault to her advantage, making it seem otherwise.
She would fling these pinpricks in the air, these hints of moonlight strolls with my godfather, or some other expedition, a visit to Lostwithiel market, and ask me in all seriousness whether she should wear the new bonnet that had come by parcel post from London—the veil had a wider mesh and did not shroud her, and my godfather had told her it became her well.
And when I fell to sulking, saying I did not care whether she concealed her features with a mask, her mood soared to serenity yet higher—the conversation was at dinner on the Monday—and while I sat frowning she carried on her talk with Seecombe, making me seem more sulky than I was.
Then in the library afterwards, with no observer present, she would relent; the serenity was with her still, but a kind of tenderness came too.
She neither laughed at me for lack of humor, nor chided me for sullenness. She asked me to hold her silks for her, to choose the colors I liked best, because she wanted to work a covering for me to use on the chair in the estate office.
And quietly, without irritating, without probing, she asked me questions about my day, whom I had seen, what I had done, so that all sulkiness went from me and I was eased and rested, and I wondered, watching her hands with the silks, smoothing them and touching them, why it could not have been thus in the first place; why first the pinprick, the barb of irritation to disturb the atmosphere, giving herself the trouble to make it calm again?
It was as if my change of mood afforded her delight, but why it should do so I had no remote idea.
I only knew that when she teased me I disliked it, and it hurt.
And when she was tender I was happy and at peace.
By the end of the month the fine weather broke.
It rained for three days without stopping, and there was no gardening to be done, no work for me on the estate, riding to and fro to be soaked to the skin, and all callers from the county were kept within their doors, like the rest of us.
It was Seecombe who suggested, what I think the pair of us had both been shirking, that the time was opportune to go through Ambrose’s effects.
He broached it one morning as my cousin Rachel and I stood by the library window, staring out at the driving rain.
“The office for me,” I had just observed, “and a day in the boudoir for you.