My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier Page A

reverence, to a tall high-backed chair beside the table. I watched him in a dream. None of this held reality. I could not see Ambrose in this house, or in this room. He could never have walked here with familiar tread, whistling, talking, throwing his stick down beside this chair, this table. Relentlessly, monotonously, the pair went round the room, throwing wide the shutters. Outside was a little court, a sort of cloistered quadrangle, open to the sky but shaded from the sun. In the center of the court stood a fountain, and the bronze statue of a boy, holding a shell in his two hands. Beyond the fountain a laburnum tree grew between the paving stones, making its own canopy of shade. The golden flowers had long since drooped and died, and now the pods lay scattered on the ground, dusty and gray. The man whispered to the woman, and she went to a corner of the quadrangle and turned a handle. Slowly, gently, the water trickled from the shell between the bronze boy’s hands. It fell down and splashed into the pool beneath.
    “The signor Ashley,” said the man, “he sat here every day, watching the fountain. He liked to see the water. He sat there, under the tree. It is very beautiful, in spring. The contessa, she would call down to him from her room above.”
    He pointed to the stone columns of the balustrade. The woman disappeared within the house, and after a moment or two appeared on the balcony where he had pointed, throwing open the shutters of the room. The water went on dripping from the shell. Never fast, never flowing, just splashing softly into the little pool.
    “In summer, always they sit here,” went on the man, “signor Ashley and the contessa. They take their meals, they hear the fountain play. I wait upon them, you understand. I bring out two trays and set them here, on this table.” He pointed to the stone table and two chairs that stood there still. “They take their tisana here after dinner,” he continued, “day after day, always the same.”
    He paused, and touched the chair with his hand. A sense of oppression grew upon me. It was cool in the quadrangle, cold almost as a grave, and yet the air was stagnant like the shuttered rooms before he opened them.
    I thought of Ambrose as he had been at home. He would walk about the grounds in summer time without a coat, an old straw hat upon his head against the sun. I could see the hat now, tilted forward over his face, and I could see him, his shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow, standing in his boat, pointing at something far away at sea. I remembered how he would reach down with his long arms, and pull me into the boat when I swam alongside.
    “Yes,” said the man, as though speaking to himself, “the signor Ashley sat in the chair here, looking at the water.”
    The woman came back and, crossing the quadrangle, turned the handle. The dripping ceased. The bronze boy looked down at an empty shell. Everything was silent, still. The child, who had stared with round eyes at the fountain, bent suddenly to the ground and began grubbing among the paving stones, picking up the laburnum pods in his small hands and throwing them into the pool. The woman scolded him, pushing him back against the wall, and seizing a broom that stood there began to sweep the court. Her action broke the stillness, and her husband touched my arm.
    “Do you wish to see the room where the signore died?” he said softly.
    Possessed with the same sense of unreality, I followed him up the wide stairway to the landing above. We passed through rooms more sparsely furnished than the apartments below, and one, looking northwards over the avenue of cypress trees, was plain and bare like a monk’s cell. A simple iron bedstead was pushed against the wall. There was a pitcher, a ewer, and a screen beside the bed. Tapestries hung over the fireplace, and in a niche in the wall was the small statuette of a kneeling madonna, her hands clasped in prayer.
    I looked at the bed. The blankets were