She put them on the bed.
She came next to a suit of clothing.
A lightweight suit—he must have worn it in hot weather. It was not familiar to me, but she must have known it well.
It was creased from lying in the trunk.
She took it out and placed it with the dressing gown upon the bed.
“It should be pressed,” she said. Suddenly she began lifting the things from the trunk very swiftly and putting them in a pile, one on top of the other, barely touching them.
“I think,” she said, “that if you don’t want them, Philip, the people on the estate here, who loved him, might like to have them.
You will know best what to give, and to whom.”
I think she did not see what she was doing.
She took them from the trunk in a sort of frenzy, while I stood by and watched her.
“The trunk?” she said.
“A trunk is always useful. You could do with the trunk?”
She looked up at me, and her voice faltered.
Suddenly she was in my arms, her head against my chest.
“Oh, Philip,” she said, “forgive me. I should have let you and Seecombe do it. I was a fool to come upstairs.”
It was queer.
Like holding a child. Like holding a wounded animal.
I touched her hair, and put my cheek against her head.
“It’s all right,” I said, “don’t cry.
Go back to the library.
I can finish it alone.”
“No,” she said, “it’s so weak of me, so stupid. It’s just as bad for you as it is for me.
You loved him so…”
I kept moving my lips against her hair. It was a strange feeling.
And she was very small, standing there against me.
“I don’t mind,” I said; “a man can do these things.
It’s not easy for a woman.
Let me do it, Rachel, go downstairs.”
She stood a little way apart and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.
“No,” she said, “I’m better now.
It won’t happen again.
And I have unpacked the clothes.
But if you will give them to the people on the estate, I shall be grateful.
And anything you want for yourself, wear it.
Never be afraid to wear it.
I shan’t mind, I shall be glad.”
The boxes of books were nearer to the fire.
I brought a chair and placed it for her, close to the warmth, and knelt beside the other trunks and opened them, one by one.
I hoped she had not noticed—I had barely noticed it myself—that for the first time I had not called her cousin, but Rachel.
I don’t know how it happened.
I think it must have been because standing there, with my arms about her, she had been so much smaller than myself.
The books did not have the personal touch about them that the clothes had done.
There were old favorites that I knew, with which he always traveled, and these she gave to me to keep beside my bed.
There were his cuff links, too, his studs, his watch, his pen—all these she pressed upon me, and I was glad of them.
Some of the books I did not know at all.
She explained them to me, picking up first one volume, then another, and now no longer was the task so sad; this book, she said, he had picked up in Rome, it was a bargain, he was pleased, and that one there, with the old binding, and the other beside it, came from Florence.
She described the place where he had bought them, and the old man who had sold them to him, and it seemed, as she chatted to me, that the strain had lifted, it had gone with the tears she had wiped away.
We laid the books, one after the other, upon the floor, and I fetched a duster for her and she dusted them.
Sometimes she read a passage out to me and told me how this paragraph had pleased Ambrose; or she showed me a picture, an engraving, and I saw her smiling at some well-remembered page.
She came upon a volume of drawings of the layout of gardens.