My Cousin Rachel Part 12

"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, G.o.d," 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?"

She had put her hands up to her face, almost in defense, as if she thought I meant to harm her.

"Yes," she said, "very."

"Then it is you who make it so," I said, "not I."

I folded my arms and looked at her, a.s.suming an ease of manner I was far from feeling. Yet in a sense by standing there, while she lay in bed, I had her at a disadvantage. I did not see how a woman with her hair loose, becoming a girl again without a woman's status, could be angry.

I saw her eyes waver. She was searching in her mind for some excuse, some new reason why she should be gone, and in a sudden flash I hit upon a master stroke of strategy.

"You told me this evening," I said, "that I should have a designer down from London, to lay out the gardens. I know that was what Ambrose always intended to do. The fact remains that I don't know of one, and should go mad with irritation anyway, if I had to have such a fellow about me. If you have any feeling for the place, knowing what it meant to Ambrose, you would remain here for a few months and do it for me."

The shaft struck home. She stared in front of her, playing with her ring. I had remarked before that when preoccupied this was a trick of hers. I pushed on with my advantage.

"I never could follow the plans that Ambrose used to draw," I said to her, "nor Tamlyn either, for that matter. He works wonders, I know, but only under direction. Time and again he has come to me this past year and asked for advice which I have been quite at a loss to give him. If you remained here-just for the autumn, when so much planting needs to be done-it would help us all."

She twisted the ring back and forth upon her finger. "I think I should ask your G.o.dfather what he feels," she said to me.

"It does not concern my G.o.dfather," I said. "What do you take me for, a schoolboy under age? There is only one consideration, whether you yourself desire to stay. If you really want to go, I cannot keep you."

She said, surprisingly, in a still small voice, "Why do you ask that? You know I want to stay."

Sweet heaven, how could I know? She had intimated the exact opposite.

"Then you will remain, for a little while," I said, "to do the garden? That is settled, and you won't go back on your word?"

"I will remain," she said, "for a little while."

I had difficulty in not smiling. Her eyes were serious, and I had the feeling that if I smiled she would change her mind. Inwardly, I triumphed.

"Very well, then," I said, "I will bid you good night and leave you. What about your letter to my G.o.dfather? Do you want me to put it in the postbag?"

"Seecombe has taken it," she said.

"Then you will sleep now, and not be angry with me anymore?"

"I wasn't angry, Philip."

"But you were. I thought you were going to hit me."

She looked up at me. "Sometimes you are so stupid," she said, "that I think one day I shall. Come here."

I drew closer, my knee touched the coverlet.

"Bend down," she said.

She took my face between her hands and kissed me.

"Now go to bed," she said, "like a good boy, and sleep well." She pushed me away, and drew her curtains.

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 G.o.dfather and to rea.s.sure 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 G.o.dfather 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. "With my love for gardening," she told them, "goes a knowledge of herbs. In Italy we always made a study of these things." And she would produce balm, from some plant, to rub upon wheezing chests, and oil from another, as a measure against burns; and she would instruct them too how to make tisana, as a remedy for indigestion and for sleeplessness-the best nightcap in the world, she said to them-and tell them how the juice of certain fruits could cure almost any ill from a sore throat to a sty on the eyelid.

"You know what will happen," I told her; "you will take the place of midwife in the district. They will send for you in the night to deliver babies, and once that starts there will be no peace for you at all."

"There is a tisana for that too," she said, "made from the leaves of raspberries and of nettles. If a woman drinks that for six months before the birth, she has her baby without pain."

"That's witchcraft," I said. "They wouldn't think it right to do so."

"What nonsense! Why should women suffer?" said my cousin Rachel.

Sometimes, in the afternoons, she would be called upon by the county, as I had warned her. And she was as successful with the "gentry," as Seecombe called them, as she was with the humbler folk. Seecombe, I soon came to realize, now lived in a seventh heaven. When the carriages drove up to the door upon a Tuesday or a Thursday, at three o'clock of an afternoon, he would be waiting in the hall. He still wore mourning, but his coat was new, kept only for these occasions. The luckless John would have the task of opening the front door to the visitors, then of pa.s.sing them onto his superior, who with slow and stately step (I would have it all from John afterwards) preceded the visitors through the hall to the drawing room. Throwing the door open with a flourish (this from my cousin Rachel) he would announce the names like the toastmaster at a banquet. Beforehand, she told me, he would discuss with her the likelihood of this or that visitor appearing, and give her a brief resume of their family history up to date. He was generally right in his prophecy of who would appear, and we wondered whether there was some method of sending messages from household to household through the servants' hall to give due warning, even as savages beat tom-toms in a jungle. For instance, Seecombe would tell my cousin Rachel that he had it for certain that Mrs. Tremayne had ordered her carriage for Thursday afternoon, and that she would bring with her the married daughter Mrs. Gough, and the unmarried daughter Miss Isobel; and that my cousin Rachel must beware when she talked to Miss Isobel, as the young lady suffered from an affliction of the speech. Or again, that upon a Tuesday old Lady Penryn would be likely to appear, because she always visited her granddaughter upon that day, who lived only ten miles distant from us; and my cousin Rachel must remember on no account to mention foxes before her, as Lady Penryn had been frightened by a fox before her eldest son was born, and he carried the stigma as a birthmark upon his left shoulder to this day.

"And Philip," said my cousin Rachel afterwards, "the whole time she was with me I had to head the conversation away from hunting. It was no use, she came back to it like a mouse sniffing at cheese. And finally, to keep her quiet, I had to invent a tale of chasing wild cats in the Alps, which is an impossibility, and something no one has done."

There was always some story of the callers with which she greeted me when I returned home, slinking by the back way through the woods when the last carriage had bowled safely down the drive; and we would laugh together, and she would smooth her hair before the mirror and straighten the cushions, while I polished off the last of the sweet cakes that had been put before the visitors. The whole thing would seem like a game, like a conspiracy; yet I think she was happy there, sitting in the drawing room making conversation. People and their lives had interest for her, how they thought, and what they did; and she used to say to me, "But you don't understand, Philip, this is all so new after the very different society in Florence. I have always wondered about life in England, in the country. Now I am beginning to know. And I love every minute of it."

I would take a lump out of the sugar bowl, and crunch it, and cut myself a slice from the seedcake.

"I can think of nothing more monotonous," I told her, "than discussing generalities with anyone, in Florence or in Cornwall."

"Ah, but you are hopeless," she said, "and will end up very narrow-minded, thinking of nothing but turnips and of kale."

I would fling myself down in the chair, and on purpose to try her put my muddy boots up on the stool, watching her with one eye. She never reproved me, and if she had noticed did not appear to do so.

"Go on," I would say, "tell me the latest scandal in the county."

"But if you are not interested," she would answer, "why should I do so?"

"Because I like to hear you talk."

So before going upstairs to change for dinner she would regale me with county gossip, what there was of it-the latest betrothals, marriages, and deaths, the new babies on the way; she appeared to glean more from twenty minutes' conversation with a stranger than I would from an acquaintance after a lifetime.

"As I suspected," she told me, "you are the despair of every mother within fifty miles."

"Why so?"

"Because you do not choose to look at any of their daughters. So tall, so presentable, so eligible in every way. Pray, Mrs. Ashley, do prevail upon your cousin to go out more."

"And what is your answer?"

"That you find all the warmth and entertainment that you need within these four walls. On second thoughts," she added, "that might be misconstrued. I must watch my tongue."

"I don't mind what you tell them," I said, "as long as you do not involve me in an invitation. I have no desire to look at anybody's daughter."

"There is heavy betting upon Louise," she said; "quite a number say that she will get you in the end. And the third Miss Pascoe has a sporting chance."

"Great heaven!" I exclaimed. "Belinda Pascoe? I'd as soon marry Katie Searle, who does the washing. Really, cousin Rachel, you might protect me. Why not tell these gossips I'm a recluse and spend all my spare time scribbling Latin verses? That might shake them."

"Nothing will shake them," she answered. "The thought that a good-looking young bachelor should like solitude and verse would make you sound all the more romantic. These things whet appet.i.te."

"Then they'll feed elsewhere," I replied. "What staggers me is the way in which the minds of women in this part of the world-perhaps it's the same everywhere-run perpetually upon marriage."

"They haven't much else to think about," she said; "the choice of fare is small. I do not escape discussion, I can tell you. A list of eligible widowers has been given me. There is a peer down in west Cornwall declared to be the very thing. Fifty, an heir, and both daughters married."

"Not old St. Ives?" I said in tones of outrage.

"Why, yes, I believe that is the name. They say he's charming."

"Charming, is he?" I said to her. "He's always drunk by midday, and creeps around the pa.s.sages after the maids. Billy Rowe, from the Barton, had a niece in service there. She had to come back home, she grew so scared."

"Who's talking gossip now?" said cousin Rachel. "Poor Lord St. Ives, perhaps if he had a wife he wouldn't creep about the pa.s.sages. It would, of course, depend upon the wife."

"Well, you're not going to marry him," I said with firmness.

"You could at least invite him here to dinner?" she suggested, her eyes full of that solemnity that I had learned now spelled mischief. "We could have a party, Philip. The prettiest young women for you, and the best-favored widowers for me. But I think I have made my choice. I think, if I am ever put to it, I will take your G.o.dfather, Mr. Kendall. He has a fair direct way of speaking, which I much admire."

Maybe she did it on purpose, but I rose to the bait, exploding.

"You cannot seriously mean it?" I said. "Marry my G.o.dfather? Why d.a.m.n it, cousin Rachel, he's nearing sixty; and he's never without a chill or some complaint."

"That means he doesn't find warmth or comfort inside his house as you do," she answered me.

I knew then that she was laughing, so laughed with her; but afterwards I wondered about it with mistrust. Certainly my G.o.dfather was most courteous when he came on Sundays, and they got on capitally together. We had dined there once or twice, and my G.o.dfather had sparkled in a way unknown to me. But he had been a widower for ten years. Surely he could not entertain so incredible an idea as to fancy his chance with my cousin Rachel? And surely she would not accept? I went hot at the thought. My cousin Rachel at Pelyn. My cousin Rachel, Mrs. Ashley, becoming Mrs. Kendall. How monstrous! If anything so presumptuous was pa.s.sing through the old man's mind I was d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.dfather 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 G.o.dfather 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 G.o.dfather 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 G.o.dfather 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 pinp.r.i.c.ks in the air, these hints of moonlight strolls with my G.o.dfather, 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 G.o.dfather 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 pinp.r.i.c.k, 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. What about those boxes down from London? More gowns to sort, and try upon your person, and return again?"

"Not gowns," she said, "but coverings for curtains. I think Aunt Phoebe's eye lacked l.u.s.ter. The blue bedroom should live up to its name. At present it is gray, not blue at all. And the quilting to the bed has moth, but don't tell Seecombe. The moth of years. I have chosen you new curtains and new quilting."

It was then that Seecombe entered, and seeing us apparently without employment said, "The weather being so inclement, sir, I had thought the boys might be put to extra cleaning within doors. Your room needs attention. But they cannot dust there while Mr. Ashley's trunks and boxes cover the floor."

I glanced at her, fearing this lack of tact might wound her, that she might turn away, but to my surprise she took it well.

"You are quite right, Seecombe," she said; "the boys cannot clean the room until the boxes are unpacked. We have left it far too long. Well, Philip, what about it?"