I cannot say what misgiving held me back, what cowardly instinct drove me to hide my head like an ostrich in the sand.
Ambrose was dead, and the past went with him when he died.
I had my own life to make, and my own will to follow.
It might be that in this letter there would be some further mention of that other matter I had chosen to forget.
If Ambrose had accused Rachel of extravagance, he could now use the same epithet, with more reason perhaps, to me.
I should have dispensed more upon the house itself in a few months than he had done in years.
I did not feel it was betrayal.
But not to read the letter… what would he say to that?
If I tore it now to shreds, and scattered the pieces, and never learned the contents, would he condemn me?
I balanced the letter in my hand, this way and that.
To read, or not to read; I wished to heaven the choice was not before me. Back in the house, my loyalty was with her.
In the boudoir, with my eyes upon her face, watching those hands, that smile, hearing her voice, no letter would have haunted me.
Yet here, in the woods beside the slab of granite where we had so often stood together, he and I, Ambrose holding the very stick I carried now, wearing the same coat, here his power was strongest.
Like a small boy who prays that the weather shall be fine upon his birthday I prayed God now that the letter should contain nothing to disturb me, and so opened it.
It was dated April of the preceding year, and was therefore written three months before he died.
“DEAREST BOY,
“If my letters have been infrequent, it is not because I have not thought of you.
You have been in my mind, these past months, perhaps more than ever before.
But a letter can miscarry, or be read by others, and I would not wish either of those things to happen; therefore I have not written, or when I have done so I know there has been little in anything I have said.
I have been ill, with fever and bad headache.
Better now.
But for how long, I cannot tell.
The fever may come again, and the headaches too, and when in the grip of them I am not responsible for what I say or do.
This much is certain.
“But I am not yet certain of the cause.
Philip, dear boy, I am much disturbed.
That is lightly said.
I am in agony of mind.
I wrote to you, during the winter I think it was, but was ill shortly afterwards and have no recollection what happened to the letter, I may very well have destroyed it in the mood that possessed me.
In it, I believe I told you of her fault that caused me so much concern.
Whether hereditary or not I cannot say, but I believe so, and believe also that the loss of our child, only a few months on its way, did her irreparable harm.
“This, by the way, I had kept from you in my letters; we were both much shaken at the time.
For my part, I have you, and am consoled.
But with a woman it goes deeper.
She had made plans and projects, as you can imagine, and when, after but four-and-a-half months, it went for nothing, and she was told by her doctor there could not be another, her distress was very great, profounder than my own.
I could swear her manner altered from that time.
The recklessness with money became progressive, and I perceived in her a tendency to evasion, to lies, to withdrawal from me, that was completely contrary to the warm nature that was hers when we first married.
As the months passed I noticed more and more that she turned to this man I have mentioned before in my letters, signor Rainaldi, a friend and I gather a lawyer of Sangalletti’s, for advice, rather than to me.
I believe this man to have a pernicious influence upon her.
I suspect him of having been in love with her for years, even when Sangalletti was alive, and although I do not for an instant believe that she ever thought of him in such a connection up to a short while ago, now, since she has altered in her manner to me, I cannot be so sure.
There is a shadow in her eye, a tone in her voice, when his name is said that awakens in my mind the most terrible suspicion.
“Brought up as she was by feckless parents, living a life, before and even during her first marriage, about which both of us have had reserve, I have often felt that her code of behavior is different to ours at home.
The tie of marriage may not be so sacred.
I suspect, in fact I have proof, that he gives her money.
Money, God forgive me for saying so, is at the present time the one way to her heart.
I believe, if the child had not been lost, none of this would be; and I wish with all my heart that I had not listened to the doctor at the time when he dissuaded travel, but had brought her home.
We would have been with you now, and all of us content.
“At times she seems like her true self, and all is well, so well that I feel I have been through some nightmare and wake again to the happiness of the first months of our marriage.
Then, with a word or an action, all is lost again.
I will come down to the terrace and find Rainaldi there.