Clever, clever Daphne du Maurier. She writes as though she had a Ph.D. in Psychology.
Oh, wait. She’s a writer. All writers know psychology. To a certain degree.
Self will not lie: the summer is over, and so many things demand her attention. How she loved reading like nothing else mattered. She read Jamaica Inn in a perfect cone of concentration.
Here in Ch. V, dear, misguided Philip Ashley, having no inkling of the train that is coming to bear down on him, meets Signor Rainaldi for the first time, and doesn’t quite trust him. Signor Rainaldi has just strongly hinted that he thinks Philip should return home to England instead of poking about Florence for answers that will never come. Philip rather unwisely reveals his worries to this complete stranger:
“These two letters,” I said stubbornly, “are not the letters of a sick man, of a person ill. They are the letters of a man who has enemies, who is surrounded by people he cannot trust.”
Signor Rainaldi watched me steadily.
“They are the letters of a man who was sick in mind, Mr. Ashley,” he answered me. “Forgive my bluntness, but I saw him those last weeks, and you did not. The experience was not a pleasant one for any of us, least of all for his wife. You see what he says in that first letter there, that she did not leave him. I can vouchsafe for that. She did not leave him night or day. Another woman would have had nuns to tend him. She nursed him alone, she spared herself nothing.”
“Yet it did not help him,” I said. “Look at the letters, and this last line, ‘She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment . . . ‘ What do you make of that, Signor Rainaldi?”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
