My Cousin Rachel

I think what shamed me most was the delight of his friends, their real pleasure and true thought for his welfare. Congratulations were showered upon me, as a sort of messenger to Ambrose, and in the midst of it all I had to smile, and nod my head, and make out to them that I had known it would happen all along. I felt double-faced, a traitor. Ambrose had so tutored me to hate falsity, in man or beast, that suddenly to find myself pretending to be other than I was came near to agony.

“The best thing that could have happened.” How often I heard the words and had to echo them. I began to shun my neighbors, and skulk at home around the woods, rather than meet the eager faces and the wagging tongues. If I rode out about the farmlands, or into town, there was no escape. Tenants on the estate, or acquaintances from here and there, had but to catch a glimpse of me and I was doomed to conversation. An indifferent actor, I forced a smile onto my face, feeling the skin stretch in protest as I did so, and was obliged to answer questions with a kind of heartiness I hated, a heartiness that the world expects when there is mention of a wedding. “When will they be coming home?” For this there was one answer. “I don’t know. Ambrose has not told me.”

There would be much speculation upon the looks, the age, the general appearance of his bride, to which I would make reply, “She is a widow, and she shares his love for gardens.”

Very suitable, the heads would nod, could not be better, the very thing for Ambrose. And then would follow jocularity, and jesting, and much amusement at the breaking in of a confirmed bachelor to wedlock. That shrew Mrs. Pascoe, the vicar’s lady, ground away upon this subject as if by doing so she won revenge for past insults upon the holy state.

“What a change there will be now, Mr. Ashley,” she said on every possible occasion. “No more go-as-you-please for your household. And a very good thing too. Some organization will at last be brought to bear upon the servants, and I don’t imagine Seecombe being too well pleased. He has had things his own way long enough.”

In this she spoke the truth. I think Seecombe was my one ally, but I was careful not to side with him, and stopped him when he tried to feel his way with me.

“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Philip,” he murmured, gloomy and resigned. “A mistress in the house will have everything upside down, and we shan’t know where we are. There will first be one thing, then another, and probably no pleasing the lady whatever is done for her. I think the time has come for me to retire and give way to a younger man. Perhaps you had better mention the matter to Mr. Ambrose when you write.”

I told him not to be foolish, and that Ambrose and I would be lost without him, but he shook his head and continued to go about the place with a long face, and never let an opportunity pass without making some sad allusion to the future, how the hours of the meals would no doubt be changed, the furniture altered, and an interminable cleaning be ordered from dawn till dusk with no repose for anybody, and, as a final thrust, even the poor dogs destroyed. This prophecy, uttered in sepulchral tones, brought back to me some measure of my own lost sense of humor, and I laughed for the first time since reading Ambrose’s letter.

What a picture Seecombe painted! I had a vision of a regiment of serving girls with mops, sweeping the house free from cobwebs, and the old steward, his underlip jutting in the familiar way, watching them in stony disapproval. His gloom amused me, but when much the same thing was foretold by others—even by Louise Kendall, who knowing me well might have had perception enough to hold her tongue—the remarks brought irritation.