My Cousin Rachel Read Free Page B

wonder, think swiftly to herself, “Ambrose must have been thus when he was young. Before my time. I did not know him when he looked like this”—and therefore stayed?
    Perhaps that was the reason why, when I had that brief meeting with Rainaldi, the Italian, for the first time also, he too looked at me with the same shock of recognition quickly veiled, and playing with a pen upon his desk thought for a moment, and then softly said to me, “You have only arrived today? Then your cousin Rachel has not seen you.” Instinct had warned him also. But too late.
    There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed, sitting here, alive and in my own home, anymore than poor Tom Jenkyn could, swinging in his chains.
    It was my godfather Nick Kendall who, in his bluff straightforward fashion, said to me on the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday—a few months ago only, yet God! how long in time—“There are some women, Philip, good women very possibly, who through no fault of their own impel disaster. Whatever they touch somehow turns to tragedy. I don’t know why I say this to you, but I feel I must.” And then he witnessed my signature on the document that I had put before him.
    No, there is no return. The boy who stood under her window on his birthday eve, the boy who stood within the doorway of her room the evening that she came, he has gone, just as the child has gone who threw a stone at a dead man on a gibbet to give himself false courage. Tom Jenkyn, battered specimen of humanity, unrecognizable and unlamented, did you, all those years ago, stare after me in pity as I went running down the woods into the future?
    Had I looked back at you, over my shoulder, I should not have seen you swinging in your chains, but my own shadow.

2
    I had no sense of foreboding, when we sat talking together that last evening, before Ambrose set out on his final journey. No premonition that we would never be together again. It was now the third autumn that the doctors had ordered him to winter abroad, and I had become used to his absence and to looking after the estate while he was away. The first winter that he went I had been up at Oxford still, so his going had made very little difference to me, but the second winter I came down for good and remained the whole time at home, which was what he wanted me to do. I did not miss the gregarious life at Oxford, in fact I was glad to be quit of it.
    I never had any desire to be anywhere but at home. Apart from my schooldays at Harrow, and afterwards at Oxford, I had never lived in any place but this house, where I had come at the age of eighteen months after my young parents died. Ambrose, in his queer generous way, was seized with pity for his small orphaned cousin, and so brought me up himself, as he might have done a puppy, or a kitten, or any frail and lonely thing needing protection.
    Ours was a strange sort of household from the first. He sent my nurse packing when I was three years old, because she smacked my bottom with a hairbrush. I don’t remember the incident, but he told me later.
    “It made me so damnably angry,” he said to me, “to see that woman belaboring your small person with her great coarse hands for some trifling misdemeanor that she was too unintelligent to comprehend. After that, I corrected you myself.”
    I never had reason to regret it. There could not be a man more fair, more just, more lovable, more full of understanding. He taught me my alphabet in the simplest possible way by using the initial letters of every swearword—twenty-six of them took some finding, but he achieved it somehow, and warned me at the same time not to use the words in company. Although invariably courteous he was shy of women, and mistrustful too, saying they made mischief in a household. Therefore he would employ only menservants, and the tribe was controlled by old Seecombe, who had been my uncle’s