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Title: Early Autumn
Author: Louis Bromfield
Release date: December 14, 2023 [eBook #72406]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1926
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EARLY AUTUMN ***
EARLY AUTUMN
_Louis Bromfield_
EARLY AUTUMN
_Copyright, 1926, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
FOR
LAURA CANFIELD WOOD
EARLY AUTUMN
CHAPTER I
1
There was a ball in the old Pentland house because for the first time in
nearly forty years there was a young girl in the family to be introduced
to the polite world of Boston and to the elect who had been asked to
come on from New York and Philadelphia. So the old house was all
bedizened with lanterns and bunches of late spring flowers, and in the
bare, white-painted, dignified hallway a negro band, hidden discreetly
by flowers, sat making noisy, obscene music.
Sybil Pentland was eighteen and lately returned from School in Paris,
whither she had been sent against the advice of the conservative members
of her own family, which, it might have been said, included in its
connections most of Boston. Already her great-aunt, Mrs. Cassandra
Struthers, a formidable woman, had gone through the list of eligible
young men--the cousins and connections who were presentable and
possessed of fortunes worthy of consideration by a family so solidly
rich as the Pentlands. It was toward this end that the ball had been
launched and the whole countryside invited, young and old, spry and
infirm, middle-aged and dowdy--toward this end and with the idea of
showing the world that the family had lost none of its prestige for all
the lack of young people in its ranks. For this prestige had once been
of national proportions, though now it had shrunk until the Pentland
name was little known outside New England. Rather, it might have been
said that the nation had run away from New England and the Pentland
family, leaving it stranded and almost forgotten by the side of the path
which marked an unruly, almost barbaric progress away from all that the
Pentland family and the old house represented.
Sybil’s grandfather had seen to it that there was plenty of champagne;
and there were tables piled with salads and cold lobster and sandwiches
and hot chicken in chafing-dishes. It was as if a family whose whole
history had been marked by thrift and caution had suddenly cast to the
winds all semblance of restraint in a heroic gesture toward splendor.
But in some way, the gesture seemed to be failing. The negro music
sounded wild and spirited, but also indiscreet and out of place in a
house so old and solemn. A few men and one or two women known for their
fondness for drink consumed a great deal of champagne, but only dulness
came of it, dulness and a kind of dead despair. The rich, the
splendorous, the gorgeous, the barbaric, had no place in rooms where the
kind Mr. Longfellow and the immortal Messrs. Emerson and Lowell had once
sat and talked of life. In a hallway, beneath the gaze of a row of
ancestors remarkable for the grimness of their faces, the music appeared
to lose its quality of abandon; it did not belong in this genteel world.
On the fringes of the party there was some drunkenness among the
undergraduates imported from Cambridge, but there was very little
gaiety. The champagne fell upon barren ground. The party drooped.
Though the affair was given primarily to place Sybil Pentland upon the
matrimonial market of this compact world, it served, too, as an
introduction for Thérèse Callendar, who had come to spend the summer at
Brook Cottage across the stony meadows on the other side of the river
from Pentlands; and as a reintroduction of her mother, a far more vivid
and remarkable person. Durham and the countryside thereabouts was
familiar enough to her, for she had been born there and passed her
childhood within sight of the spire of the Durham town meeting-house.
And now, after an absence of twenty years, she had come back out of a
world which her own people--the people of her childhood--considered
strange and ungenteel. Her world was one filled with queer people, a
world remote from the quiet old house at Pentlands and the great
brownstone houses of Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Street. Indeed, it
was this woman, Sabine Callendar, who seemed to have stolen all the
thunder at the ball; beside her, neither of the young girls, her own
daughter nor Sybil Pentland, appeared to attract any great interest. It
was Sabine whom every one noticed, acquaintances of her childhood
because they were devoured by curiosity concerning those missing twenty
years, and strangers because she was the most picturesque and arresting
figure at the ball.
It was not that she surrounded herself by adoring young men eager to
dance with her. She was, after all, a woman of forty-six, and she had no
tolerance for mooning boys whose conversation was limited to bootlegging
and college clubs. It was a success of a singular sort, a triumph of
indifference.
People like Aunt Cassie Struthers remembered her as a shy and awkward
young girl with a plain face, a good figure and brick-red hair which
twenty years ago had been spoken of as “Poor Sabine’s ugly red hair.”
She was a girl in those days who suffered miserably at balls and
dinners, who shrank from all social life and preferred solitude. And
now, here she was--returned--a tall woman of forty-six, with the same
splendid figure, the same long nose and green eyes set a trifle too near
each other, but a woman so striking in appearance and the confidence of
her bearing that she managed somehow to dim the success even of younger,
prettier women and virtually to extinguish the embryonic young things in
pink-and-white tulle. Moving about indolently from room to room,
greeting the people who had known her as a girl, addressing here and
there an acquaintance which she had made in the course of the queer,
independent, nomadic life she had led since divorcing her husband, there
was an arrogance in her very walk that frightened the young and produced
in the older members of Durham community (all the cousins and
connections and indefinable relatives), a sense of profound irritation.
Once she had been one of them, and now she seemed completely independent
of them all, a traitress who had flung to the winds all the little rules
of life drilled into her by Aunt Cassie and other aunts and cousins in
the days when she had been an awkward, homely little girl with shocking
red hair. Once she had belonged to this tight little world, and now she
had returned--a woman who should have been defeated and a little
declassée and somehow, irritatingly, was not. Instead, she was a
“figure” much sought after in the world, enveloped by the mysterious
cloud of esteem which surrounds such persons--a woman, in short, who was
able to pick her friends from the ranks of distinguished and even
celebrated people. It was not only because this was true, but because
people like Aunt Cassie _knew_ it was true, that she aroused interest
and even indignation. She had turned her back upon them all and no awful
fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and
made of it a fine, even a glittering, success; and this is a thing which
is not easily forgiven.
As she moved through the big rooms--complete and perfect from her
superbly done, burnished red hair to the tips of her silver
slippers--there was about her an assurance and an air of confidence in
her own perfection that bordered upon insolence. There was a hard
radiance and beauty in the brilliant green dress and the thin chain of
diamonds that dimmed all of the others, that made most of the women seem
dowdy and put together with pins. Undoubtedly her presence also served
to dampen the gaiety. One knew from the look in the disdainful green
eyes and the faint mocking smile on the frankly painted red mouth that
she was aware of the effect she made and was delighted with her triumph.
Wherever she went, always escorted by some man she had chosen with the
air of conferring a favor, a little stir preceded her. She was indeed
very disagreeable....
If she had a rival in all the crowd that filled the echoing old house,
it was Olivia Pentland--Sybil’s mother--who moved about, alone most of
the time, watching her guests, acutely conscious that the ball was not
all it should have been. There was about her nothing flamboyant and
arresting, nothing which glittered with the worldly hardness of the
green dress and the diamonds and burnished red hair of Sabine Callendar;
she was, rather, a soft woman, of gentleness and poise, whose dark
beauty conquered in a slower, more subtle fashion. You did not notice
her at once among all the guests; you became aware of her slowly, as if
her presence had the effect of stealing over you with the vagueness of a
perfume. Suddenly you marked her from among all the others ... with a
sense of faint excitement ... a pale white face, framed by smooth black
hair drawn back low over the brows in a small knot at the back of her
head. You noticed the clear, frank blue eyes, that in some lights seemed
almost black, and most of all you noticed when she spoke that her voice
was low, warm, and in a way irresistible, a voice with a hundred shades
of color. She had a way, too, of laughing, when she was struck by the
absurdity of something, that was like a child. One knew her at once for
a great lady. It was impossible to believe that she was nearly forty and
the mother of Sybil and a boy of fifteen.
Circumstance and a wisdom of her own had made of her a woman who seemed
inactive and self-effacing. She had a manner of doing things
effortlessly, with a great quietness, and yet, after one came to know
her, one felt that she missed little which took place within sight or
hearing--not only the obvious things which any stupid person might have
noticed, but the subtle, indefinite currents which passed from one
person to another. She possessed, it seemed, a marvelous gift for
smoothing out troubles. A security, of the sort which often marks those
who suffer from a too great awareness, enveloped and preceded her,
turning to calm all the troubled world about her. Yet she was
disturbing, too, in an odd, indefinable way. There was always a
remoteness and a mystery, a sense almost of the _fey_. It was only after
one had known her for a long time, enveloped in the quietness of her
pleasant presence, that a faint sense of uneasiness was born. It would
occur to you, with the surprise almost of a shock, that the woman you
saw before you, the woman who was so gentle and serene, was not Olivia
Pentland at all, but a kind of clay figure which concealed, far beneath
the veneer of charm, a woman you did not know at all, who was remote and
sad and perhaps lonely. In the end, she disturbed the person of
discernment far more profoundly than the glittering, disagreeable Sabine
Callendar.
In the midst of the noise and confusion of the ball, she had been moving
about, now in this big room, now in that one, talking quietly to her
guests, watching them, seeing that all went well; and, like all the
others, she was fascinated at the spectacle of Sabine’s rebellion and
triumph, perhaps even a little amused at the childishness of such
defiance in a woman of forty-six who was clever, independent and even
distinguished, who need not have troubled to flaunt her success.
Watching Sabine, whom she knew intimately enough, she had guessed that
underneath the shell made so superbly by hairdresser, couturier and
jeweler there lay hidden an awkward, red-haired little girl who was
having her revenge now, walking roughshod over all the prejudices and
traditions of such people as Aunt Cassie and John Pentland and Cousin
Struthers Smallwood, D.D., whom Sabine always called “the Apostle to the
Genteel.” It was almost, thought Olivia, as if Sabine, even after an
exile of twenty years, was still afraid of them and that curious,
undefeatable power which they represented.
But Sabine, she knew, was observing the party at the same time. She had
watched her all the evening in the act of “absorbing” it; she knew that
when Sabine walked across from Brook Cottage the next day, she would
know everything that had happened at the ball, for she had a passion for
inspecting life. Beneath the stony mask of indifference there boiled a
perpetual and passionate interest in the intricacies of human affairs.
Sabine herself had once described it as “the curse of analysis which
took all the zest out of life.”
She was fond of Sabine as a creature unique in the realm of her
experience, one who was amusing and actually made fetishes of truth and
reality. She had a way of turning her intellect (for it was really a
great intellect) upon some tangled, hopeless situation to dissolve it
somehow into its proper elements and make it appear suddenly clear,
uncomplicated and, more often than not, unpleasant; because the truth
was not always a sweet and pleasant thing.
2
No one suffered more keenly from Sabine’s triumphant return than the
invincible Aunt Cassie. In a way, she had always looked upon Sabine,
even in the long years of her voluntary exile from the delights of
Durham, as her own property, much as she might have looked upon a dog,
if, indeed, the old lady had been able to bear the society of anything
so untidy as a dog. Childless herself, she had exercised all her
theories of upbringing upon the unfortunate orphaned little daughter of
her husband’s brother.
At the moment, the old lady sat half-way down the white stairs, her
sharp, black eyes surveying the ball with a faint air of disapproval.
The noisy music made her nervous and uneasy, and the way young girls had
of using paint and powder seemed to her cheap and common. “One might as
well brush one’s teeth at the dinner-table.” Secretly, she kept
comparing everything with the ball given for herself forty years
earlier, an event which had resulted at length in the capture of Mr.
Struthers. Dressed economically (for she made it a point of honor to
live on the income of her income), and in mourning for a husband dead
eight years earlier, she resembled a dignified but slightly uneasy crow
perched on a fence.
It was Sabine who observed that Aunt Cassie and her “lady companion,”
Miss Peavey, sitting on the steps together, resembled a crow and a
pouter pigeon. Miss Peavey was not only fat, she was actually
bulbous--one of those women inclined by nature toward “flesh,” who would
have been fat on a diet of sawdust and distilled water; and she had come
into the family life nearly thirty years earlier as a companion, a kind
of slave, to divert Aunt Cassie during the long period of her
invalidism. She had remained there ever since, taking the place of a
husband who was dead and children who had never been born.
There was something childlike about Miss Peavey--some people said that
she was not quite bright--but she suited Aunt Cassie to a T, for she was
as submissive as a child and wholly dependent in a financial sense. Aunt
Cassie even gave her enough to make up for the losses she incurred by
keeping a small shop in Boston devoted to the sale of “artistic”
pottery. Miss Peavey was a lady, and though penniless, was “well
connected” in Boston. At sixty she had grown too heavy for her birdlike
little feet and so took very little exercise. To-night she was dressed
in a very fancy gown covered with lace and sequins and passementerie,
rather in the mode which some one had told her was her style in the
far-off days of her girlhood. Her hair was streaked with gray and cut
short in a shaggy, uneven fashion; not, however, because short hair was
_chic_, but because she had cut it ten years before short hair had been
heard of, in a sudden futile gesture of freedom at the terrible moment
she made her one feeble attempt to escape Aunt Cassie and lead her own
life. She had come back in the end, when her poor savings gave out and
bankruptcy faced her, to be received by Aunt Cassie with dignified sighs
and flutters as a returned and repentant prodigal. In this rôle she had
lived ever since in a state of complete subjection. She was Aunt
Cassie’s creature now, to go where Aunt Cassie ordered, to do as she was
bid, to be an ear-piece when there was at hand no one more worthy of
address.
At the sight of Sabine’s green dress and red hair moving through the big
hall below them, Aunt Cassie said, with a gleam in her eye: “Sabine
seems to be worried about her daughter. The poor child doesn’t seem to
be having a success, but I suppose it’s no wonder. The poor thing is
very plain. I suppose she got the sallow skin from her father. He was
part Greek and French.... Sabine was never popular as a young girl
herself.”
And she fell to speculating for the hundredth time on the little-known
circumstances of Sabine’s unhappy marriage and divorce, turning the
morsels over and over again with a variety of speculation and the
interjection of much pious phraseology; for in Aunt Cassie’s speech God
seemed to have a hand in everything. He had a way of delivering trials
and blessings indiscriminately, and so in the end became responsible for
everything.
Indeed, she grew a bit spiteful about Sabine, for there was in the back
of her mind the memory of an encounter, a day or two earlier, when she
had been put completely to rout. It was seldom that Aunt Cassie met any
one who was a match for her, and when such an encounter took place the
memory of it rankled until she found some means of subduing the
offender. With Miss Peavey she was completely frank, for through long
service this plump, elderly virgin had come to be a sort of confessor in
whose presence Aunt Cassie wore no mask. She was always saying, “Don’t
mind Miss Peavey. She doesn’t matter.”
“I find Sabine extremely hard and worldly,” she was saying. “I would
never know her for the same modest young girl she was on leaving me.”
She sighed abysmally and continued, “But, then, we mustn’t judge. I
suppose the poor girl has had a great deal of misery. I pity her to the
depths of my heart!”
In Aunt Cassie’s speeches, in every phrase, there was always a certain
mild theatrical overtone as if she sought constantly to cast a sort of
melodramatic haze over all she said. Nothing was ever stated simply.
Everything from the sight of a pot of sour cream to the death of her
husband affected her extravagantly, to the depths of her soul.
But this brought no response from Miss Peavey, who seemed lost in the
excitement of watching the young people, her round candid eyes shining
through her pince-nez with the eagerness of one who has spent her whole
life as a “lady companion.” At moments like this, Aunt Cassie felt that
Miss Peavey was not quite bright, and sometimes said so.
Undiscouraged, she went on. “Olivia looks bad, too, to-night ... very
tired and worn. I don’t like those circles under her eyes.... I’ve
thought for a long time that she was unhappy about something.”
But Miss Peavey’s volatile nature continued to lose itself completely in
the spectacle of young girls who were so different from the girls of her
day; and in the fascinating sight of Mr. Hoskins, a fat, sentimental,
middle-aged neighbor who had taken a glass too much champagne and was
talking archly to the patient Olivia. Miss Peavey had quite forgotten
herself in the midst of so much gaiety. She did not even see the glances
of Aunt Cassie in her direction--glances which plainly said, “Wait until
I get you alone!”
For a long time Aunt Cassie had been brooding over what she called
“Olivia’s strange behavior.” It was a thing which she had noticed for
the first time a month or two earlier when Olivia, in the midst of one
of Aunt Cassie’s morning calls, had begun suddenly, quietly, to weep and
had left the room without a word of explanation. It had gone from bad to
worse lately; she felt Olivia slipping away from all control directly in
opposition to her own benevolent advice. There was the matter of this
very ball. Olivia had ignored her counsels of economy and thrift, and
now Aunt Cassie was suffering, as if the champagne which flowed so
freely were blood drawn from her own veins. Not for a century, since
Savina Pentland purchased a parure of pearls and emeralds, had so much
Pentland money been expended at one time on mere pleasure.
She disapproved, too, of the youthfulness of Olivia and of Sabine. Women
of their ages ought not to look so fresh and young. There was something
vulgar, even a little improper, in a woman like Sabine who at forty-six
looked thirty-five. At thirty, Aunt Cassie herself had settled down as a
middle-aged woman, and since then she had not changed greatly. At
sixty-five, “childless and alone in the world” (save, of course, for
Miss Peavey), she was much the same as she had been at thirty in the
rôle of wife to the “trying Mr. Struthers.” The only change had been her
recovery from a state of semi-invalidism, a miracle occurring
simultaneously with the passing of Mr. Struthers.
She had never quite forgiven Olivia for being an outsider who had come
into the intricate web of life at Pentlands out of (of all places)
Chicago. Wisps of mystery and a faint sense of the alien had clung to
her ever since. Of course, it wasn’t to be expected that Olivia could
understand entirely what it meant to marry into a family whose history
was so closely woven into that of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the
life of Boston. What could it mean to Olivia that Mr. Longfellow and Mr.
Lowell and Dr. Holmes had often spent weeks at Pentlands? That Mr.
Emerson himself had come there for week-ends? Still (Aunt Cassie
admitted to herself), Olivia had done remarkably well. She had been wise
enough to watch and wait and not go ahead strewing her path with
blunders.
Into the midst of these thoughts the figure of Olivia herself appeared,
moving toward the stairway, walking beside Sabine. They were laughing
over something, Sabine in the sly, mocking way she had, and Olivia
mischievously, with a suspicious twinkle in her eyes. Aunt Cassie was
filled with an awful feeling that they were sharing some joke about the
people at the ball, perhaps even about herself and Miss Peavey. Since
Sabine had returned, she felt that Olivia had grown even more strange
and rebellious; nevertheless, she admitted to herself that there was a
distinction about them both. She preferred the quiet distinction of
Olivia to the violence of the impression made by the glittering Sabine.
The old lady sensed the distinction, but, belonging to a generation
which lived upon emotion rather than analysis, she did not get to the
root of it. She did not see that one felt at once on seeing Olivia,
“Here is a lady!”--perhaps, in the true sense of the word, the only lady
in the room. There was a gentleness about her and a softness and a proud
sort of poise--all qualities of which Aunt Cassie approved; it was the
air of mystery which upset the old lady. One never knew quite what
Olivia was thinking. She was so gentle and soft-spoken. Sometimes of
late, when pressing Olivia too hotly, Aunt Cassie, aware of rousing
something indefinably perilous in the nature of the younger woman, drew
back in alarm.
Rising stiffly, the old lady groaned a little and, moving down the
stairs, said, “I must go, Olivia dear,” and, turning, “Miss Peavey will
go with me.”
Miss Peavey would have stayed, because she was enjoying herself, looking
down on all those young people, but she had obeyed the commands of Aunt
Cassie for too long, and now she rose, complaining faintly, and made
ready to leave.
Olivia urged them to stay, and Sabine, looking at the old lady out of
green eyes that held a faint glitter of hatred, said abruptly: “I always
thought you stayed until the bitter end, Aunt Cassie.”
A sigh answered her ... a sigh filled with implications regarding Aunt
Cassie’s position as a lonely, ill, bereft, widowed creature for whom
life was finished long ago. “I am not young any longer, Sabine,” she
said. “And I feel that the old ought to give way to the young. There
comes a time....”
Sabine gave an unearthly chuckle. “Ah,” she said, in her hard voice, “I
haven’t begun to give up yet. I am still good for years.”
“You’re not a child any more, Sabine,” the old lady said sharply.
“No, certainly I’m not a child any more.” And the remark silenced Aunt
Cassie, for it struck home at the memory of that wretched scene in which
she had been put to rout so skilfully.
There was a great bustle about getting the two old ladies under way, a
great search for cloaks and scarfs and impedimenta; but at last they
went off, Aunt Cassie saying over her thin, high shoulder, “Will you say
good-by to your dear father-in-law, Olivia? I suppose he’s playing
bridge with Mrs. Soames.”
“Yes,” replied Olivia from the terrace, “he’s playing bridge with Mrs.
Soames.”
Aunt Cassie merely cleared her throat, forcibly, and with a deep
significance. In her look, as in the sound of her voice, she managed to
launch a flood of disapproval upon the behavior of old John Pentland and
old Mrs. Soames.
Bidding the driver to go very slowly, she climbed into her shabby,
antiquated motor, followed respectfully by Miss Peavey, and drove off
down the long elm-bordered drive between the lines of waiting motors.
Olivia’s “dear father-in-law” was Aunt Cassie’s own brother, but she
chose always to relate him to Olivia, as if in some way it bound Olivia
more closely, more hopelessly, into the fabric of the family.
* * * * *
As the two younger women reentered the house, Olivia asked, “Where’s
Thérèse? I haven’t seen her for more than an hour.”
“She’s gone home.”
“Thérèse ... gone home ... from a ball given for her!”
Olivia halted in astonishment and stood leaning against the wall,
looking so charming and lovely that Sabine thought, “It’s a sin for a
woman so beautiful to have such a life.”
Aloud Sabine said, “I caught her stealing away. She walked across to the
cottage. She said she hated it and was miserable and bored and would
rather be in bed.” Sabine shrugged her handsome shoulders and added, “So
I let her go. What difference does it make?”
“None, I suppose.”
“I never force her to do things of this sort. I had too much forcing
when I was young; Thérèse is to do exactly as she likes and be
independent. The trouble is, she’s been spoilt by knowing older men and
men who talk intelligently.” She laughed and added, “I was wrong about
coming back here. I’ll never marry her off in this part of the world.
The men are all afraid of her.”
Olivia kept seeing the absurd figure of Sabine’s daughter, small and
dark, with large burning eyes and an air of sulky independence, striding
off on foot through the dust of the lane that led back to Brook Cottage.
She was so different from her own daughter, the quiet, well-mannered
Sybil.
“I don’t think she’s properly impressed by Durham,” said Olivia, with a
sudden mischievous smile.
“No ... she’s bored by it.”
Olivia paused to say good-night to a little procession of guests ... the
Pingree girls dressed alike in pink tulle; the plump Miss Perkins, who
had the finest collection of samplers in New England; Rodney Phillips,
whose life was devoted to breeding springers and behaving like a perfect
English gentleman; old Mr. Tilney, whose fortune rested on the mills of
Durham and Lynn and Salem; and Bishop Smallwood, a cousin of the
Pentlands and Sabine (whom Sabine called the Apostle of the Genteel).
The Bishop complimented Olivia on the beauty of her daughter and
coquetted heavily with Sabine. Motors rushed out from among the lilacs
and syringas and bore them away one by one.
When they had gone Sabine said abruptly, “What sort of man is this
Higgins ... I mean your head stableman?”
“A good sort,” replied Olivia. “The children are very fond of him. Why?”
“Oh ... no reason at all. I happened to think of him to-night because I
noticed him standing on the terrace just now looking in at the ball.”
“He was a jockey once ... a good one, I believe, until he got too
heavy. He’s been with us ten years. He’s good and reliable and sometimes
very funny. Old Mr. Pentland depends on him for everything.... Only he
has a way of getting into scrapes with the girls from the village. He
seems irresistible to them ... and he’s an immoral scamp.”
Sabine’s face lighted up suddenly, as if she had made a great discovery.
“I thought so,” she observed, and wandered away abruptly to continue the
business of “absorbing” the ball.
She had asked about Higgins because the man was stuck there in her
brain, set in the midst of a strange, confused impression that disturbed
a mind usually marked by precision and clarity. She did not understand
why it was that he remained the most vivid of all the kaleidoscopic
procession of the ball. He had been an outsider, a servant, looking in
upon it, and yet there he was--a man whom she had never noticed
before--vivid and clear-cut, dominating the whole evening.
It had happened a little earlier when, standing in the windowed alcove
of the old red-paneled writing-room, she had turned her back for a
moment on the ball, to look out upon the distant marshes and the sea,
across meadows where every stone and tree and hedge was thrown into a
brilliant relief by the clarity of the moonlight and the thin New
England air. And trapped suddenly by the still and breathless beauty of
the meadows and marshes and distant white dunes, lost in memories more
than twenty years old, she had found herself thinking: “It was always
like this ... rather beautiful and hard and cold and a little barren,
only I never saw it before. It’s only now, when I’ve come back after
twenty years, that I see my own country exactly as it is.”
And then, standing there quite alone, she had become aware slowly that
she was being watched by some one. There was a sudden movement among the
lilacs that stood a little way off wrapped in thick black shadows ...
the faintest stirring of the leaves that drew her sharply back to a
consciousness of where she was and why she was there; and, focusing all
her attention, she was able to make out presently a short, stocky little
figure, and a white face peering out from among the branches, watching
the dancers who moved about inside the house. The sight produced in her
suddenly a sensation of uneasiness and a faint prickling of the skin,
which slipped away presently when she recognized the odd, prematurely
wrinkled face of Higgins, the Pentland groom. She must have seen him a
dozen times before, barely noticing him, but now she saw him with a kind
of illuminating clarity, in a way which made his face and figure
unforgettable.
He was clad in the eternal riding-breeches and a sleeveless cotton shirt
that exposed the short, hairy, muscular arms. Standing there he seemed,
with his arched, firmly planted legs, like some creature rooted into the
soil ... like the old apple-tree which stood in the moonlight showering
the last of its white petals on the black lawn. There was something
unpleasant in the sight, as if (she thought afterwards) she had been
watched without knowing it by some animal of an uncanny intelligence.
And then abruptly he had slipped away again, shyly, among the branches
of the lilacs ... like a faun.
* * * * *
Olivia, looking after Sabine as she walked away, smiled at the knowledge
of where she was bound. Sabine would go into the old writing-room and
there, sitting in a corner, would pretend that she was interested in the
latest number of the _Mercure de France_ or some fashion paper, and all
the time she would be watching, listening, while old John Pentland and
poor battered old Mrs. Soames sat playing bridge with a pair of
contemporaries. Sabine, she knew, wanted to probe the lives of the two
old people. She wasn’t content like the others at Pentlands to go on
pretending that there had never been anything between them. She wanted
to get to the root of the story, to know the truth. It was the truth,
always the truth, which fascinated Sabine.
And Olivia felt a sudden, swift, almost poignant wave of affection for
the abrupt, grim woman, an affection which it was impossible to express
because Sabine was too scornful of all sentiment and too shut in ever to
receive gracefully a demonstration; yet she fancied that Sabine knew she
was fond of her, in the same shy, silent way that old John Pentland knew
she was fond of him. It was impossible for either of them ever to speak
of such simple things as affection.
Since Sabine had come to Durham, it seemed to Olivia that life was a
little less barren and not quite so hopeless. There was in Sabine a
curious hard, solid strength which the others, save only the old man,
lacked completely. Sabine had made some discovery in life that had set
her free ... of everything but that terrible barrier of false coldness.
In the midst of these thoughts came another procession of retreating
guests, and the sadness, slipping away from Olivia’s face, gave way to a
perfect, artificial sort of gaiety. She smiled, she murmured,
“Good-night, must you go,” and, “Good-night, I’m so glad that you liked
the ball.” She was arch with silly old men and kind to the shy young
ones and repeated the same phrases over and over again monotonously.
People went away saying, “What a charming woman Olivia Pentland is!”
Yet immediately afterward she did not remember who had passed by her.
One by one the guests departed, and presently the black musicians packed
up their instruments and went away, and at last Sybil appeared, shy and
dark, looking a little pale and tired in her clinging gown of pale
green. At sight of her daughter a little thrill of pride ran through
Olivia. She was the loveliest of all the girls at the ball, not the
most flamboyant, but the gentlest and really the most beautiful. She
possessed the same slow beauty of her mother, which enveloped one in a
kind of mist that lingered long after she herself had gone away. She was
neither loud and mannish and vulgar like the “horsey” women nor common
like the girls who used too much paint and tried to behave like women of
the world. There was already about her the timelessness that envelops a
lady no matter the generation in which she appears; there was a mystery,
a sophistication and knowledge of life which put to rout all the cheap
flashiness of the others. And yet, somehow, that same cool, shy poise
and beauty frightened people. Boys who were used to calling young girls
“Good old So-and-so” found themselves helpless before the dignity of a
young girl who looked in her green gown a little like a cool wood-nymph.
It troubled Olivia profoundly, not for herself, but because she wanted
the girl to be happy--more than that, to know the depths of happiness
which she herself had sensed but never found. It was in a way as if she
saw herself again in Sybil, as if looking back now from the pinnacle of
her own experience she could guide this younger self, standing on the
brink of life, along paths less barren than those trod by her own feet.
It was so necessary that Sybil should fall in love with a man who would
make her happy. With most girls it would make little difference one way
or another, so long as they had money; if they were unhappy or bored
they would divorce their husbands and try again because that was the
rule in their world. But with Sybil, marriage would be either an
immense, incalculable happiness or a profound and hopeless tragedy.
She thought suddenly of what Sabine had said of Thérèse a little while
before. “I was wrong about coming back here. I’ll never marry her off in
this part of the world.”
It was true somehow of Sybil. The girl, in some mysterious fashion, knew
what it was she wanted; and this was not a life which was safe and
assured, running smoothly in a rigid groove fixed by tradition and
circumstance. It was not marriage with a man who was like all the other
men in his world. It went deeper than all that. She wanted somehow to
get far down beneath the surface of that life all about her, deep down
where there was a savor to all she did. It was a hunger which Olivia
understood well enough.
The girl approached her mother and, slipping her arm about her waist,
stood there, looking for all the world like Olivia’s sister.
“Have you enjoyed it?” asked Olivia.
“Yes.... It’s been fun.”
Olivia smiled. “But not too much?”
“No, not too much.” Sybil laughed abruptly, as if some humorous memory
had suddenly come to life.
“Thérèse ran away,” said her mother.
“I know ... she told me she was going to.”
“She didn’t like it.”
“No ... she thought the boys stupid.”
“They’re very much like all boys of their age. It’s not an interesting
time.”
Sybil frowned a little. “Thérèse doesn’t think so. She says all they
have to talk about is their clubs and drinking ... neither subject is of
very much interest.”
“They might have been, if you’d lived here always ... like the other
girls. You and Thérèse see it from the outside.” The girl didn’t answer,
and Olivia asked: “You don’t think I was wrong in sending you to France
to school?”
Quickly Sybil looked up. “Oh, no ... no,” she said, and then added with
smoldering eagerness, “I wouldn’t have changed it for anything in the
world.”
“I thought you might enjoy life more if you saw a little more than one
corner of it.... I wanted you to be away from here for a little time.”
(She did not say what she thought--“because I wanted you to escape the
blight that touches everything at Pentlands.”)
“I’m glad,” the girl replied. “I’m glad because it makes everything
different.... I can’t explain it.... Only as if everything had more
meaning than it would have otherwise.”
Suddenly Olivia kissed her daughter and said: “You’re a clever girl;
things aren’t wasted on you. And now go along to bed. I’ll stop in to
say good-night.”
She watched the girl as she moved away through the big empty hall past
the long procession of Pentland family portraits, thinking all the while
that beside them Sybil seemed so fresh and full of warm eager life; and
when at last she turned, she encountered her father-in-law and old Mrs.
Soames moving along the narrow passage that led from the writing-room.
It struck her sharply that the gaunt, handsome old John Pentland seemed
really old to-night, in a way he had never been before, old and a little
bent, with purplish circles under his bright black eyes.
Old Mrs. Soames, with her funny, intricate, dyed-black coiffure and
rouged cheeks and sagging chin supported by a collar of pearls, leaned
on his arm--the wreck of a handsome woman who had fallen back upon such
silly, obvious tricks as rouge and dye--a vain, tragic old woman who
never knew that she was a figure of fun. At sight of her, there rose in
Olivia’s mind a whole vista of memories--assembly after assembly with
Mrs. Soames in stomacher and tiara standing in the reception line bowing
and smirking over rites that had survived in a provincial fashion some
darker, more barbaric, social age.
And the sight of the old man walking gently and slowly, out of deference
to Mrs. Soames’ infirmities, filled Olivia with a sudden desire to weep.
John Pentland said, “I’m going to drive over with Mrs. Soames, Olivia
dear. You can leave the door open for me.” And giving his
daughter-in-law a quick look of affection he led Mrs. Soames away across
the terrace to his motor.
It was only after they had gone that Olivia discovered Sabine standing
in the corridor in her brilliant green dress watching the two old people
from the shadow of one of the deep-set windows. For a moment, absorbed
in the sight of John Pentland helping Mrs. Soames with a grim
courtliness into the motor, neither of them spoke, but as the motor
drove away down the long drive under the moon-silvered elms, Sabine
sighed and said, “I can remember her as a great beauty ... a really
great beauty. There aren’t any more like her, who make their beauty a
profession. I used to see her when I was a little girl. She was
beautiful--like Diana in the hunting-field. They’ve been like that for
... for how long.... It must be forty years, I suppose.”
“I don’t know,” said Olivia quietly. “They’ve been like that ever since
I came to Pentlands.” (And as she spoke she was overcome by a terrible
feeling of sadness, of an abysmal futility. It had come to her more and
more often of late, so often that at times it alarmed her lest she was
growing morbid.)
Sabine was speaking again in her familiar, precise, metallic voice. “I
wonder,” she said, “if there has ever been anything....”
Olivia, divining the rest of the question, answered it quickly,
interrupting the speech. “No ... I’m sure there’s never been anything
more than we’ve seen.... I know him well enough to know that.”
For a long time Sabine remained thoughtful, and at last she said: “No
... I suppose you’re right. There couldn’t have been anything. He’s the
last of the Puritans.... The others don’t count. They go on pretending,
but they don’t believe any more. They’ve no vitality left. They’re only
hypocrites and shadows.... He’s the last of the royal line.”
She picked up her silver cloak and, flinging it about her fine white
shoulders, said abruptly: “It’s almost morning. I must get some sleep.
The time’s coming when I have to think about such things. We’re not as
young as we once were, Olivia.”
On the moonlit terrace she turned and asked: “Where was O’Hara? I didn’t
see him.”
“No ... he was asked. I think he didn’t come on account of Anson and
Aunt Cassie.”
The only reply made by Sabine was a kind of scornful grunt. She turned
away and entered her motor. The ball was over now and the last guest
gone, and she had missed nothing--Aunt Cassie, nor old John Pentland,
nor O’Hara’s absence, nor even Higgins watching them all in the
moonlight from the shadow of the lilacs.
The night had turned cold as the morning approached and Olivia, standing
in the doorway, shivered a little as she watched Sabine enter her motor
and drive away. Far across the meadows she saw the lights of John
Pentland’s motor racing along the lane on the way to the house of old
Mrs. Soames; she watched them as they swept out of sight behind the
birch thicket and reappeared once more beyond the turnpike, and as she
turned away at last it occurred to her that the life at Pentlands had
undergone some subtle change since the return of Sabine.
CHAPTER II
It was Olivia’s habit (and in some way every small action at Pentlands
came inevitably to be a habit) to go about the house each night before
climbing the paneled stairs, to see that all was in order, and by
instinct she made the little tour as usual after Sabine had disappeared,
stopping here and there to speak to the servants, bidding them to go to
bed and clear away in the morning. On her way she found that the door of
the drawing-room, which had been open all the evening, was now, for some
reason, closed.
It was a big square room belonging to the old part of the house that had
been built by the Pentland who made a fortune out of equipping
privateers and practising a sort of piracy upon British merchantmen--a
room which in the passing of years had come to be a museum filled with
the relics and souvenirs of a family which could trace its ancestry back
three hundred years to a small dissenting shopkeeper who had stepped
ashore on the bleak New England coast very soon after Miles Standish and
Priscilla Alden. It was a room much used by all the family and had a
worn, pleasant look that compensated for the monstrous and incongruous
collection of pictures and furniture. There were two or three Sheraton
and Heppelwhite chairs and a handsome old mahogany table, and there were
a plush sofa and a vast rocking-chair of uncertain ancestry, and a
hideous bronze lamp that had been the gift of Mr. Longfellow to old John
Pentland’s mother. There were two execrable water-colors--one of the
Tiber and the Castle San Angelo and one of an Italian village--made by
Miss Maria Pentland during a tour of Italy in 1846, and a stuffed chair
with tassels, a gift from old Colonel Higginson, a frigid steel
engraving of the Signing of the Declaration which hung over the white
mantelpiece, and a complete set of Woodrow Wilson’s History of the
United States given by Senator Lodge (whom Aunt Cassie always referred
to as “dear Mr. Lodge”). In this room were collected mementoes of long
visits paid by Mr. Lowell and Mr. Emerson and General Curtis and other
good New Englanders, all souvenirs which Olivia had left exactly as she
found them when she came to the big house as the bride of Anson
Pentland; and to those who knew the room and the family there was
nothing unbeautiful or absurd about it. The effect was historical. On
entering it one almost expected a guide to step forward and say, “Mr.
Longfellow once wrote at this desk,” and, “This was Senator Lodge’s
favorite chair.” Olivia knew each tiny thing in the room with a sharp
sense of intimacy.
She opened the door softly and found that the lights were still burning
and, strangest of all, that her husband was sitting at the old desk
surrounded by the musty books and yellowed letters and papers from which
he was compiling laboriously a book known as “The Pentland Family and
the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” The sight of him surprised her, for it
was his habit to retire punctually at eleven every night, even on such
an occasion as this. He had disappeared hours earlier from the ball, and
he still sat here in his dinner coat, though it was long after midnight.
She had entered the room so softly that he did not hear her and for a
moment she remained silently looking down at him, as if undetermined
whether to speak or to go quietly away. He sat with his back to her so
that the sloping shoulders and the thin, ridged neck and partly bald
head stood outlined against the white of the paneling. Suddenly, as if
conscious of being watched, he turned and looked at her. He was a man
of forty-nine who looked older, with a long horse-face like Aunt
Cassie’s--a face that was handsome in a tired, yellow sort of way--and
small, round eyes the color of pale-blue porcelain. At the sight of
Olivia the face took on a pouting expression of sourness ... a look
which she knew well as one that he wore when he meant to complain of
something.
“You are sitting up very late,” she observed quietly, with a deliberate
air of having noticed nothing unusual.
“I was waiting to speak to you. I want to talk with you. Please sit down
for a moment.”
There was an odd sense of strangeness in their manner toward each other,
as if there had never been, even years before when the children were
babies, any great intimacy between them. On his part there was, too, a
sort of stiff and nervous formality, rather quaint and Victorian, and
touched by an odd air of timidity. He was a man who would always do not
perhaps the proper thing, but the thing accepted by his world as
“proper.”
It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them
had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for
so many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant
usually that there was some complaint to be made against the servants,
more often than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd,
inexplicable intensity.
Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she
was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half
without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would
annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat
there, waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on
which he had been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange,
unaccustomed desire to be disagreeable, to create in some way an
excitement that would shatter for a moment the overwhelming sense of
monotony and so relieve her nerves. She thought, “What has come over me?
Am I one of those women who enjoys working up scenes?”
He rose from his chair and stood, very tall and thin, with drooping
shoulders, looking down at her out of the pale eyes. “It’s about Sybil,”
he said. “I understand that she goes riding every morning with this
fellow O’Hara.”
“That’s true,” replied Olivia quietly. “They go every morning before
breakfast, before the rest of us are out.”
He frowned and assumed almost mechanically a manner of severe dignity.
“And you mean to say that you have known about it all along?”
“They meet down in the meadows by the old gravel-pit because he doesn’t
care to come up to the house.”
“He knows, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be welcome.”
Olivia smiled a little ironically. “I’m sure that’s the reason. That’s
why he didn’t come to-night, though I asked him. You must know, Anson,
that I don’t feel as you do about him.”
“No, I suppose not. You rarely do.”
“There’s no need to be unpleasant,” she said quietly.
“You seem to know a great deal about it.”
“Sybil tells me everything she does. It is much better to have it that
way, I think.”
Watching him, it gave her a faint, warm sense of satisfaction to see
that Anson was annoyed by her calmness, and yet she was a little
ashamed, too, for wanting the excitement of a small scene, just a tiny
scene, to make life seem a little more exciting. He said, “But you know
how Aunt Cassie and my father feel about O’Hara.”
Then, for the first time, Olivia began to see light in the darkness.
“Your father knows all about it, Anson. He has gone with them himself on
the red mare, once or twice.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Why should I make up such a ridiculous lie? Besides, your father and I
get on very well. You know that.” It was a mild thrust which had its
success, for Anson turned away angrily. She had really said to him,
“Your father comes to _me_ about everything, not to you. He is not the
one who objects or I should have known.” Aloud she said, “Besides, I
have seen him with my own eyes.”
“Then I will take it on my own responsibility. I don’t like it and I
want it stopped.”
At this speech Olivia’s brows arched ever so slightly with a look which
might have been interpreted either as one of surprise or one of mockery
or perhaps a little of both. For a moment she sat quite still, thinking,
and at last she said, “Am I right in supposing that Aunt Cassie is at
the bottom of this?” When he made no reply she continued, “Aunt Cassie
must have gotten up very early to see them off.” Again a silence, and
the dark little devil in Olivia urged her to say, “Or perhaps she got
her information from the servants. She often does, you know.”
Slowly, while she was speaking, her husband’s face had grown more and
more sour. The very color of the skin seemed to have changed so that it
appeared faintly green in the light from the Victorian luster just above
his narrow head.
“Olivia, you have no right to speak of my aunt in that way.”
“We needn’t go into that. I think you know that what I said was the
truth.” And a slow warmth began to steal over her. She was getting
beneath his skin. After all those long years, he was finding that she
was not entirely gentle.
He was exasperated now and astonished. In a more gentle voice he said,
“Olivia, I don’t understand what has come over you lately.”
She found herself thinking, wildly, “Perhaps he is going to soften.
Perhaps there is still a chance of warmth in him. Perhaps even now,
after so long, he is going to be pleasant and kind and perhaps ...
perhaps ... more.”
“You’re very queer,” he was saying. “I’m not the only one who finds you
so.”
“No,” said Olivia, a little sadly. “Aunt Cassie does, too. She’s been
telling all the neighborhood that I seem to be unhappy. Perhaps it’s
because I’m a little tired. I’ve not had much rest for a long time now
... from Jack, from Aunt Cassie, from your father ... and ... from
_her_.” At the last word she made a curious little half-gesture in the
direction of the dark north wing of the big house.
She watched him, conscious that he was shocked and startled by her
mentioning in a single breath so many things which they never discussed
at Pentlands, things which they buried in silence and tried to destroy
by pretending that they did not exist.
“We ought to speak of those things, sometimes,” she continued sadly.
“Sometimes when we are entirely alone with no one about to hear, when it
doesn’t make any difference. We can’t pretend forever that they don’t
exist.”
For a time he was silent, groping obviously, in a kind of desperation
for something to answer. At last he said feebly, “And yet you sit up all
night playing bridge with Sabine and old Mrs. Soames and Father.”
“That does me good. You must admit that it is a change at least.”
But he only answered, “I don’t understand you,” and began to pace up and
down in agitation while she sat there waiting, actually waiting, for the
thing to work itself up to a climax. She had a sudden feeling of
victory, of intoxication such as she had not known in years, not since
she was a young girl; and at the same time she wanted to laugh, wildly,
hysterically, at the sight of Anson, so tall and thin, prancing up and
down.
Opposite her he halted abruptly and said, “And I can see no good in
inviting Mrs. Soames here so often.”
She saw now that the tension, the excitement between them, was greater
even than she had imagined, for Anson had spoken of Mrs. Soames and his
father, a thing which in the family no one ever mentioned. He had done
it quite openly, of his own free will.
“What harm can it do now? What difference can it make?” she asked. “It
is the only pleasure left to the poor battered old thing, and one of the
few left to your father.”
Anson began to mutter in disgust. “It is a silly affair ... two old ...
old....” He did not finish the sentence, for there was only one word
that could have finished it and that was a word which no gentleman and
certainly no Pentland ever used in referring to his own father.
“Perhaps,” said Olivia, “it is a silly affair now.... I’m not so sure
that it always was.”
“What do you mean by that? Do you mean....” Again he fumbled for words,
groping to avoid using the words that clearly came into his mind. It was
strange to see him brought face to face with realities, to see him grow
so helpless and muddled. “Do you mean,” he stammered, “that my father
has ever behaved ...” he choked and then added, “dishonorably.”
“Anson ... I feel strangely like being honest to-night ... just for once
... just for once.”
“You are succeeding only in being perverse.”
“No ...” and she found herself smiling sadly, “unless you mean that in
this house ... in this room....” She made a gesture which swept within
the circle of her white arm all that collection of Victorian souvenirs,
all the mementoes of a once sturdy and powerful Puritan family, “...in
this room to be truthful and honest is to be perverse.”
He would have interrupted her here, angrily, but she raised her hand and
continued, “No, Anson; I shall tell you honestly what I think ...
whether you want to hear it or not. I don’t hope that it will do any
good.... I do not know whether, as you put it, your father has behaved
dishonorably or not. I hope he has.... I hope he was Mrs. Soames’ lover
in the days when love could have meant something to them.... Yes ...
something fleshly is exactly what I mean.... I think it would have been
better. I think they might have been happy ... really happy for a little
time ... not just living in a state of enchantment when one day is
exactly like the next.... I think your father, of all men, has deserved
that happiness....” She sighed and added in a low voice, “There, now you
know!”
For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round,
silly blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were
so like the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing
and was known in the family simply as _she_, as if there was very little
that was human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping
mustache, as if speaking to himself, “I can’t imagine what has happened
to you.”
“Nothing,” said Olivia. “Nothing. I am the same as I have always been,
only to-night I have come to the end of saying ‘yes, yes’ to everything,
of always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living
undisturbed in our dream ... believing always that we are superior to
every one else on the earth, that because we are rich we are powerful
and righteous, that because ... oh, there is no use in talking.... I am
just the same as I have always been, only to-night I have spoken out. We
all live in a dream here ... a dream that some day will turn sharply
into a nightmare. And then what will we do? What will you do ... and
Aunt Cassie and all the rest?”
In her excitement her cheeks grew flushed and she stood up, very tall
and beautiful, leaning against the mantelpiece; but her husband did not
notice her. He appeared to be lost in deep thought, his face contorted
with a kind of grim concentration.
“I know what has happened,” he said presently. “It is Sabine. She should
never have come back here. She was like that always ... stirring up
trouble ... even as a little girl. She used to break up our games by
saying: ‘I won’t play house. Who can be so foolish as to pretend muddy
water is claret! It’s a silly game.’”
“Do you mean that she is saying it again now ... that it’s a silly game
to pretend muddy water is claret?”
He turned away without answering and began again to pace up and down
over the enormous faded roses of the old Victorian carpet. “I don’t know
what you’re driving at. All I know is that Sabine ... Sabine ... is an
evil woman.”
“Do you hate Sabine because she is a friend of mine?”
She had watched him for so many years disliking the people who were her
friends, managing somehow to get rid of them, to keep her from seeing
them, to force her into those endless dinners at the houses of the safe
men he knew, the men who had gone to his college and belonged to his
club, the men who would never do anything that was unexpected. And in
the end she had always done as he wanted her to do. It was perhaps a
manifestation of his resentment toward all those whom he could not
understand and even (she thought) feared a little--the attitude of a man
who will not allow others to enjoy what he could not take for himself.
It was the first time she had ever spoken of this dog-in-the-manger
game, but she found herself unable to keep silent. It was as if some
power outside her had taken possession of her body. She had a strange
sensation of shame at the very moment she spoke, of shame at the sound
of her own voice, a little strained and hysterical.
There was something preposterous, too, in the sight of Anson prancing up
and down the old room filled with all the souvenirs of that decayed
respectability in which he wrapped himself ... prancing up and down with
all his prejudices and superstitions bristling. And now Olivia had
dragged the truth uncomfortably into the light.
“What an absurd thing to say!” he said bitterly.
Olivia sighed. “No, I don’t think so.... I think you know exactly what I
mean.” (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a
truthful, unpleasant statement.)
But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her, more
savage and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed
for a second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. “And I don’t
like that Fiji Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all
over the world and had her head filled with barbaric ideas.”
At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a
sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of
their conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had
spent here at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon
Street. She knew suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt
Cassie and all that intricate world of family. They were terrified lest
the walls, the very foundations, of their existence be swept away
leaving them helpless with all their little prides and vanities exposed,
stripped of all the laws and prejudices which they had made to protect
them. It was why they hated O’Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He
had menaced their security. To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for
in any other world save their own, in a world where they stood
unprotected by all that money laid away in solid trust funds, they would
have no existence whatever. They would suddenly _be_ what they _really_
were.
She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, “I
think you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You
distrust her because she is different from all the others ... from the
sort of girls that you were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows
there are enough of them about here ... girls as like as peas in a pod.”
“And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her
daughter ... this American boy with a French name who has never seen his
own country until now? I suppose he’ll be as queer as all the others.
Who knows anything about him?”
“Sabine,” began Olivia.
“Sabine!” he interrupted. “Sabine! What does she care who he is or where
he comes from? She’s given up decent people long ago, when she went away
from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband. Sabine!...
Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us ... the people to whom she
belongs. She hates us.... She can barely speak to me in a civil
fashion.”
Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath
the cold steel engraving of the Signing. “You are beginning to talk
nonsense, Anson. Let’s stick to facts, for once. I’ve met the boy in
Paris.... Sybil knew him there. He is intelligent and handsome and
treats women as if they were something more than stable-boys. There are
still a few of us left who like to be treated thus ... as women ... a
few of us even here in Durham. No, I don’t imagine you’ll care for him.
He won’t belong to your club or to your college, and he’ll see life in a
different way. He won’t have had his opinions all ready made, waiting
for him.”
“It’s my children I’m thinking of.... I don’t want them picking up with
any one, with the first person who comes along.”
Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, “If it’s Jack
you’re worrying about, you needn’t fuss any longer. He won’t marry
Thérèse. I don’t think you know how ill he is.... I don’t think,
sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all.”
“I always talk with the doctors.”
“Then you ought to know that they’re silly ... the things you’re
saying.”
“All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here....”
She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel
of futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a
cage, arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning
with an air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the
fireplace ... pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark
eyes. There was a fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which
had flamed up so suddenly were too violent for the body.
“Anson,” she said in a low voice, “please let’s be sensible. I shall
look into this affair of Sybil and O’Hara and try to discover whether
there is anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly
to both of them. I don’t approve, either, but not for the same reason.
He is too old for her. You won’t have any trouble. You will have to do
nothing.... As to Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I
like.”
In the midst of the speech she had grown suddenly, perilously, calm in
the way which sometimes alarmed her husband and Aunt Cassie. Sighing a
little, she continued, “I have been good and gentle, Anson, for years
and years, and now, to-night ... to-night I feel as if I were coming to
the end of it.... I only say this to let you know that it can’t go on
forever.”
Picking up her scarf, she did not wait for him to answer her, but moved
away toward the door, still enveloped in the same perilous calm. In the
doorway she turned. “I suppose we can call the affair settled for the
moment?”
He had been standing there all the while watching her out of the round
cold blue eyes with a look of astonishment as if after all those years
he had seen his wife for the first time; and then slowly the look of
astonishment melted into one of slyness, almost of hatred, as if he
thought, “So this is what you really are! So you have been thinking
these things all these years and have never belonged to us at all. You
have been hating us all the while. You have always been an outsider--a
common, vulgar outsider.”
His thin, discontented lips had turned faintly gray, and when he spoke
it was nervously, with a kind of desperation, like a small animal
trapped in a corner. The words came out from the thin lips in a sharp,
quick torrent, like the rush of white-hot steel released from a cauldron
... words spoken in a voice that was cold and shaken with hatred.
“In any case,” he said, “in any case ... I will not have my daughter
marry a shanty Irishman.... There is enough of that in the family.”
For a moment Olivia leaned against the door-sill, her dark eyes wide
with astonishment, as if she found it impossible to believe what she had
heard. And then quietly, with a terrible sadness and serenity in her
voice, she murmured almost to herself, “What a rotten thing to say!” And
after a little pause, as if still speaking to herself, “So that is what
you have been thinking for twenty years!” And again, “There is a
terrible answer to that.... It’s so terrible that I shan’t say it, but
I think you ... you and Aunt Cassie know well enough what it is.”
Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated,
among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare,
she made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland
ancestors--the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional
evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina
Pentland--and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband had
not followed her in more than fifteen years.
* * * * *
Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the
darkness, listening, listening, listening.... There was at first no
sound save the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the
white dunes and the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the
direction of the kennels, and then, presently, there came to her the
faint sound of soft, easy breathing from the adjoining room. It was
regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son had been as strong as
O’Hara or Higgins or that vigorous young de Cyon whom she had met once
for a little while at Sabine’s house in Paris.
The sound filled her with a wild happiness, so that she forgot even what
had happened in the drawing-room a little while before. As she undressed
in the darkness she stopped now and then to listen again in a kind of
fierce tension, as if by wishing it she could keep the sound from ever
dying away. For more than three years she had never once entered this
room free from the terror that there might only be silence to welcome
her. And at last, after she had gone to bed and was falling asleep, she
was wakened sharply by another sound, quite different, the sound of a
wild, almost human cry ... savage and wicked, and followed by the thud
thud of hoofs beating savagely against the walls of a stall, and then
the voice of Higgins, the groom, cursing wickedly. She had heard it
before--the sound of old John Pentland’s evil, beautiful red mare
kicking the walls of her stall and screaming wildly. There was an
unearthly, implacable hatred between her and the little apelike man ...
and yet a sort of fascination, too. As she sat up in her bed, listening,
and still startled by the wild sound, she heard her son saying:
“Mama, are you there?”
“Yes.”
She rose and went into the other room, where, in the dim light from the
night-lamp, the boy was sitting up in bed, his pale blond hair all
rumpled, his eyes wide open and staring a little.
“You’re all right, Jack?” she whispered. “There’s nothing the matter?”
“No--nothing. I had a bad dream and then I heard the red mare.”
He looked pale and ill, with the blue veins showing on his temples; yet
she knew that he was stronger than he had been for months. He was
fifteen, and he looked younger than his age, rather like a boy of
thirteen or fourteen, but he was old, too, in the timeless fashion of
those who have always been ill.
“Is the party over?... Have they all gone?” he asked.
“Yes, Jack.... It’s almost daylight. You’d better try to sleep again.”
He lay down without answering her, and as she bent to kiss him
good-night, she heard him say softly, “I wish I could have gone to the
party.”
“You will, Jack, some day--before very long. You’re growing stronger
every day.”
Again a silence, while Olivia thought bitterly, “He knows that I’m
lying. He knows that what I’ve said is not the truth.”
Aloud she said, “You’ll go to sleep now--like a good boy.”
“I wish you’d tell me about the party.”
Olivia sighed. “Then I must close Nannie’s door, so we won’t waken her.”
And she closed the door leading to the room where the old nurse slept,
and seating herself on the foot of her son’s bed, she began a recital of
who had been at the ball, and what had happened there, bit by bit,
carefully and with all the skill she was able to summon. She wanted to
give him, who had so little chance of living, all the sense of life she
was able to evoke.
She talked on and on, until presently she noticed that the boy had
fallen asleep and that the sky beyond the marshes had begun to turn gray
and rose and yellow with the rising day.
CHAPTER III
1
When Olivia first came to the old house as the wife of Anson Pentland,
the village of Durham, which lay inland from Pentlands and the sea, had
been invisible, lying concealed in a fold of the land which marked the
faint beginnings of the New Hampshire mountains. There had been in the
view a certain sleepy peacefulness: one knew that in the distant fold of
land surmounted by a single white spire there lay a quiet village of
white wooden houses built along a single street called High Street that
was dappled in summer with the shadows of old elm-trees. In those days
it had been a country village, half asleep, with empty shuttered houses
here and there falling into slow decay--a village with fewer people in
it than there had been a hundred years before. It had stayed thus
sleeping for nearly seventy-five years, since the day when a great
migration of citizens had robbed it of its sturdiest young people. In
the thick grass that surrounded the old meeting-house there lay a marble
slab recording the event with an inscription which read:
FROM THIS SPOT ON THE FOURTEENTH DAY OF AUGUST, EIGHTEEN HUNDRED
AND EIGHTEEN, THE REVEREND JOSIAH MILFORD, PASTOR OF THIS CHURCH,
WITH ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY MEMBERS OF HIS CONGREGATION--MEN, WOMEN
AND CHILDREN--SET OUT, SECURE IN THEIR FAITH IN ALMIGHTY GOD, TO
ESTABLISH HIS WILL AND POWER IN THE WILDERNESS OF THE WESTERN
RESERVE.
Beneath the inscription were cut the names of those families who had
made the journey to found a new town which had since surpassed sleepy
Durham a hundred times in wealth and prosperity. There was no Pentland
name among them, for the Pentlands had been rich even in the year
eighteen hundred and eighteen, and lived in winter in Boston and in
summer at Durham, on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first
of the family.
From that day until the mills came to Durham the village sank slowly
into a kind of lethargy, and the church itself, robbed of its strength,
died presently and was changed into a dusty museum filled with homely
early American furniture and spinning-wheels--a place seldom visited by
any one and painted grudgingly every five years by the town council
because it was popularly considered an historical monument. The Pentland
family long ago had filtered away into the cold faith of the Unitarians
or the more compromising and easy creeds of the Episcopal church.
But now, nearly twenty years after Olivia had come to Pentlands, the
village was alive again, so alive that it had overflowed its little fold
in the land and was streaming down the hill on the side next to the sea
in straight, plain columns of ugly stucco bungalows, each filled with
its little family of Polish mill-workers. And in the town, across High
Street from the white-spired old meeting-house, there stood a new
church, built of stucco and green-painted wood and dedicated to the
great Church of Rome. In the old wooden houses along High Street there
still lingered remnants of the old families ... old Mrs. Featherstone,
who did washing to support four sickly grandchildren who ought never to
have been born; Miss Haddon, a queer old woman who wore a black cape and
lived on a dole from old John Pentland as a remote cousin of the family;
Harry Peckhan, the village carpenter; old Mrs. Malson, living alone in a
damp, gaunt and beautiful old house filled with bits of jade and ivory
brought back from China by her grandfather’s clippers; Miss Murgatroyd,
who had long since turned her bullfinch house into a shabby tea-room.
They remained here and there, a few worn and shabby-genteel descendants
of those first settlers who had come into the country with the
Pentlands.
But the mills had changed everything, the mills which poured wealth into
the pockets of a dozen rich families who lived in summer within a few
miles of Durham.
Even the countryside itself had changed. There were no longer any of the
old New Englanders in possession of the land. Sometimes in riding along
the lanes one encountered a thin, silly-faced remnant of the race
sitting on a stone wall chewing a bit of grass; but that was all; the
others had been swallowed up long ago in the mills of Salem and Lynn or
died away, from too much inbreeding and too little nourishment. The few
farms that remained fell into the hands of Poles and Czechs, solid,
square people who were a little pagan in their closeness to the earth
and the animals which surrounded them, sturdy people, not too moral, who
wrought wonders with the barren, stony earth of New England and stood
behind their walls staring wide-eyed while the grand people like the
Pentlands rode by in pink coats surrounded by the waving nervous tails
of foxhounds. And, one by one, other old farms were being turned back
into a wilderness once more so that there would be plenty of room for
the horses and hounds to run after foxes and bags of aniseed.
It had all changed enormously. From the upper windows of the big
Georgian brick house where the Pentlands lived, one could see the record
of all the changes. The windows commanded a wide view of a landscape
composed of grubby meadows and stone walls, thickets of pine and white
birches, marshes, and a winding sluggish brown river. Sometimes in the
late autumn the deer wandered down from the mountains of New Hampshire
to spoil the fox-hunting by leading the hounds astray after game that
was far too fleet for them.
And nearer at hand, nestled within a turn of the river, lay the land
where Sabine Callender had been born and had lived until she was a grown
woman--the land which she had sold carelessly to O’Hara, an Irish
politician and a Roman Catholic, come up from nowhere to take possession
of it, to clip its hedges, repair its sagging walls, paint its old
buildings and put up gates and fences that were too shiny and new.
Indeed, he had done it so thoroughly and so well that the whole place
had a little the air of a suburban real estate development. And now
Sabine had returned to spend the summer in one of his houses and to be
very friendly with him in the face of Aunt Cassie and Anson Pentland,
and a score of others like them.
Olivia knew this wide and somberly beautiful landscape, every stick and
stone of it, from the perilous gravel-pit, half-hidden by its fringe of
elder-bushes, to the black pine copse where Higgins had discovered only
a day or two before a new litter of foxes. She knew it on gray days when
it was cold and depressing, on those bright, terribly clear New England
days when every twig and leaf seemed outlined by light, and on those
damp, cold days when a gray fog swept in across the marshes from the sea
to envelop all the countryside in gray darkness. It was a hard,
uncompromising, stony country that was never too cheerful.
It was a country, too, which gave her an old feeling of loneliness ... a
feeling which, strangely enough, seemed to increase rather than diminish
as the years passed. She had never accustomed herself to its occasional
dreariness. In the beginning, a long while ago, it had seemed to her
green and peaceful and full of quiet, a place where she might find rest
and peace ... but she had come long since to see it as it was, as Sabine
had seen it while she stood in the window of the writing-room,
frightened by the sudden queer apparition of the little groom--a
country beautiful, hard and cold, and a little barren.
2
There were times when the memories of Olivia’s youth seemed to sharpen
suddenly and sweep in upon her, overwhelming all sense of the present,
times when she wanted suddenly and fiercely to step back into that
far-off past which had seemed then an unhappy thing, and these were the
times when she felt most lonely, the times when she knew how completely,
with the passing of years, she had drawn into herself; it was a process
of protection like a tortoise drawing in its head. And all the while, in
spite of the smiles and the politeness and the too facile amiability,
she felt that she was really a stranger at Pentlands, that there were
certain walls and barriers which she could never break down, past which
she could never penetrate, certain faiths in which it was impossible for
her to believe.
It was difficult now for her to remember very clearly what had happened
before she came to Durham; it all seemed lost, confused, buried beneath
the weight of her devotion to the vast family monument of the Pentlands.
She had forgotten the names of people and places and confused the days
and the years. At times it was difficult for her to remember the endless
confusing voyages back and forth across the Atlantic and the vast,
impersonal, vacuous hotels which had followed each other in the bleak
and unreal procession of her childhood.
She could remember with a certain pitiful clarity two happy years spent
at the school in Saint-Cloud, where for months at a time she had lived
in a single room which she might call her own, where she had rested,
free from the terror of hearing her mother say, “We must pack to-day.
We are leaving to-morrow for St. Petersburg or London or San Remo or
Cairo....”
She could scarcely remember at all the immense house of
chocolate-colored stone fitted with fantastic turrets and balconies that
overlooked Lake Michigan. It had been sold and torn down long ago,
destroyed like all else that belonged to the far-off past. She could not
remember the father who had died when she was three; but of him there
remained at least a yellowing photograph of a great, handsome, brawny
man with a humorous Scotch-Irish face, who had died at the moment when
his name was coming to be known everywhere as a power in Washington. No,
nothing remained of him save the old photograph, and the tenuous,
mocking little smile which had come down to her, the way she had of
saying, “Yes! Yes!” pleasantly when she meant to act in quite the
contrary fashion.
There were times when the memory of her own mother became vague and
fantastic, as if she had been no more than a figure out of some absurd
photograph of the early nineteen hundreds ... the figure of a pretty
woman, dressed fashionably in clothes that flowed away in both
directions, from a wasp waist. It was like a figure out of one of those
old photographs which one views with a kind of melancholy amusement. She
remembered a vain, rather selfish and pretty woman, fond of flattery,
who had been shrewd enough never to marry any one of those gallant dark
gentlemen with high-sounding titles who came to call at the eternal
changeless hotel sitting-room, to take her out to garden parties and
fêtes and races. And always in the background of the memory there was
the figure of a dark little girl, overflowing with spirits and a hunger
for friends, who was left behind to amuse herself by walking out with
the Swiss governess, to make friends among the children she encountered
in the parks or on the beaches and the boulevards of whatever European
city her mother was visiting at the moment ... friends whom she saw
to-day and who were vanished to-morrow never to be seen again. Her
mother, she saw now, belonged to the America of the nineties. She saw
her now less as a real person than a character out of a novel by Mrs.
Wharton.
But she had never remarried; she had remained the rich, pretty Mrs.
McConnel of Chicago until that tragic day (the clearest of all Olivia’s
memories and the most terrible) when she had died of fever abruptly in a
remote and squalid Italian village, with only her daughter (a girl of
seventeen), a quack doctor and the Russian driver of her motor to care
for her.
The procession of confused and not-too-cheerful memories came to a
climax in a gloomy, red brick house off Washington Square, where she had
gone as an orphan to live with a rigid, bejetted, maternal aunt who had
believed that the whole world revolved about Lenox, the Hudson River
Valley and Washington Square--an aunt who had never spoken to Olivia’s
father because she, like Anson and Aunt Cassie, had a prejudice against
Irishmen who appeared out of nowhere, engaging, full of life and high
spirits.
So at eighteen she had found herself alone in the world save for one
bejetted aunt, with no friends save those she had picked up as a child
on beaches and promenades, whose names she could no longer even
remember. And the only fixed world she knew was the world of the aunt
who talked incessantly of the plush, camphor-smelling splendor of a New
York which no longer existed.
Olivia saw it all clearly now. She saw why it was that when Anson
Pentland came one night to call upon her aunt she had thought him an
elegant and fascinating man whose presence at dinner had the power of
transforming the solid walnut and mahogany dining-room into a brilliant
place. He was what girls called “an older man,” and he had flattered her
by his politeness and attentions. He had even taken her chaperoned by
the aunt, to see a performance of “The City,” little knowing that the
indecorousness to be unfolded there would force them to leave before the
play was over. They had gone on a Thursday evening (she could even
remember the very day) and she still smiled at the memory of their
belief that a girl who had spent all her life in the corridors of
European hotels should not know what the play was about.
And then it had all ended by her being asked to Pentlands for a visit
... to Pentlands, where she had come upon a world such as she had never
known before, a world green and peaceful and secure, where every one was
elaborately kind to her for reasons that she never learned until long
afterward. They never even told her the truth about Anson’s mother, the
old woman who lived in solitude in the north wing. She was, they said,
too ill at the moment to see any one. Pentlands, in that far-off day,
had seemed to the tired, friendless girl like some vast, soft green bed
where she could fling herself down and rest forever, a world where she
could make friends and send down roots that would hold her secure for
all time. To a hotel child Pentlands was a paradise; so when Anson
Pentland asked her to marry him, she accepted him because she did not
find him actually repulsive.
And now, after all those years, it was spring again ... spring as when
she had come to Pentlands for the first time, and she was thirty-nine
years old and still young; only everything had changed.
* * * * *
Bit by bit, in the years that followed the birth of Sybil and then of
Jack, the whole picture of the life at Pentlands and in the brownstone
house on Beacon Street had come to assume a pattern, to take form out of
the first confused and misty impressions, so that, looking back upon it,
she was beginning to understand it all with the chill clarity of
disillusion.
She saw herself as a shy young girl to whom they had all been
elaborately kind because it was so necessary for Anson to have a wife
and produce an heir.... Anson, the last male descendant of such a
glorious family. (“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay
Colony.”) She saw herself as they must have seen her ... a pretty young
girl, disarmed by their kindness, who was not known in their world but
was at least charming and a lady and quite rich. (She knew now how much
the money must have counted with Aunt Cassie.) And she saw Anson now,
across all the expanse of years, not as a Prince Charming come to rescue
her from an ogre aunt, but as he had really been ... a rather anemic
man, past thirty, of an appalling propriety. (There was a bitter humor
in the memories of his timid advances toward her, of all the distaste
with which he approached the details of marriage ... a humor which she
had come to understand fully only as she grew older and wiser in the
ways of the world.) Looking back, she saw him as a man who had tried
again and again to marry young women he had known all his life and who
had failed because somehow he had gained a mysterious reputation for
being a bore ... a young man who, left to himself, would never have
approached any woman, and gone to the grave as virginal as he had been
born.
She saw now that he had never been even in the slightest in love with
her. He had married her only because he got no peace from all the
others, both the living and the dead, who in such a strange fashion
seemed also to live at Pentlands. It was Aunt Cassie and even poor silly
Miss Peavey and powerful old John Pentland and the cousins and all those
dead hanging in neat rows in the hall who had married her. Anson had
only been an instrument; and even in the most bitter moments she felt
strangely sorry for him, because he, too, had had all his life ruined.
And so, slowly during all those long years, the pretty, shy, unknown
Olivia McConnel, whose father was a Democratic politician out of
Chicago, had turned into this puzzled, sometimes unhappy woman, the
outsider, who had come in some mysterious fashion to be the one upon
whom all of them leaned for strength.
* * * * *
She was glad now that she had stood forth boldly at last and faced Anson
and all those who stood behind him there in the drawing-room, both the
living and the dead, peering over his shoulder, urging him on. The
unpleasant argument, though it had wounded her, had cleared the air a
little. It had laid bare for a second the reality which she had been
seeking for so long a time. Anson had been right about Sabine: in the
clear bright air of the New England morning she knew that it was the
sense of Sabine’s nearness which had given her the strength to be
unpleasant. Sabine, like herself, had known the great world, and so she
was able to see their world here in Durham with a clarity that the
others never approached. She was strong, too, in her knowledge that
whatever happened she (Olivia) was the one person whom they could not
afford to lose, because they had depended on her for too long.
But she was hurt. She kept thinking again and again of what Anson had
said.... “_In any case, I will not have my daughter marry a shanty
Irishman. There is enough of that in the family._”
She knew that Anson would suffer from shame for what he had said, but
she knew, too, that he would pretend nothing had happened, that he had
never made such a speech, because it was unworthy of a gentleman and a
Pentland. He would pretend, as he always did, that the scene had never
occurred.
When he had made the speech he had meant that she ought to have been
thankful that they allowed her to marry into the Pentland family. There
was a buried something in them all, a conviction that was a part of
their very flesh, which made them believe in such a privilege. And for
her who knew so much more than the world knew, who saw so much more than
any of them of the truth, there was only one answer, to be wrung from
her with a tragic intensity ... “Oh, my God!...”
3
The dining-room was large and square, and having been redecorated in a
period later than the rest of the house, was done in heavy mahogany,
with a vast shiny table in the center which when reduced to its smallest
possible circumference still left those who seated themselves about it
formally remote from one another.
It was a well-used table, for since circumstance had kept John Pentland
from going into the world, he had brought a part of it into his own home
with a hospitality and a warmth that rather upset his sister Cassie.
She, herself, like most of the family, had never cared very profoundly
for food, looking upon it almost as a necessity. A prune to her palate
shared importance as a delicacy with a truffle. In the secrecy of her
own house, moved by her passion for economy, she more often than not
assuaged her own birdlike appetite with scraps from the cupboard, though
at such times the simple but full-blooded Miss Peavey suffered keenly.
“A pick-up meal” was a byword with Aunt Cassie, and so she frowned upon
the rich food furnished by old John Pentland and his daughter-in-law,
Olivia.
Nevertheless, she took a great many meals at the mahogany table and even
managed to insinuate within its circle the plump figure of Miss Peavey,
whose silly laugh and servile echoes of his sister’s opinions the old
man detested.
Anson never lunched at home, for he went up to Boston each morning at
nine o’clock, like a man of affairs, with much business to care for. He
kept an office in Water Street and went to it with a passionate
regularity, to spend the day in the petty affairs of club committees and
societies for the improvement of this or that; for he was a man who
fortified his own soul by arranging the lives of others. He was chairman
of a committee which “aired” young girls who had fallen into trouble,
and contributed as much as he was able out of his own rather slender
income to the activities of the Watch and Ward Society. And a large part
of the day was spent in correspondence with genealogists on the subject
of “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He did not in
a whole year earn enough money to pay the office rent for one month, but
he had no patience with the many cases of poverty and destitution which
came to his notice. The stocks and bonds of the Pentland estate had been
kept carefully out of his reach, by a father who distrusted activities
such as Anson’s, and even now, when he was nearly fifty, Anson had only
a small income left by his grandfather and an allowance, paid him each
month by his father, as if he were still a boy in college.
So when Olivia came down to lunch on the day after the ball she was not
forced to face Anson and his shame over the scene of the night before.
There were only the grandfather and Sybil and Jack--who was well enough
to come down.
The old man sat at the head, in the place which he had never
relinquished as the dictator, the ruler of all the family. Tall and
muscular, he had grown leathery from exposure during the years he had
lived in the country, riding day after day in rains and blizzards, in
sunlight and in storms, as if there were in him some atavistic hunger
for the hardy life led by the first Pentlands to come to Durham. He
always rode the vicious and unruly beautiful red mare ... a grim old man
who was a match for her famous bad temper. He was rather like his
sister Cassie in appearance--one of the black Pentlands who had appeared
mysteriously in the line nearly a hundred years earlier, and he had
burning black eyes that looked out from shaggy brows ... a man as
different in appearance and vigor from his son as it was possible to
imagine. (For Anson was a typical Pentland--blond, with round blue eyes
and an inclination when in health toward ruddiness.) One stood in awe of
the old man: there was a grimness about the strong, rough-cut face and
contracted lips, and a curious, indefinable air of disapproval which one
was never able to pin down or analyze.
He was silent to-day, in one of the black moods which Olivia knew well
meant that he was troubled. She knew that this time it had nothing to do
with Jack’s illness, for the boy sat there opposite them, looking
stronger than he had looked in months ... blond and pale and thin, with
the blue veins showing at his pathetic wrists and on his thin, handsome
temples.
Olivia had lived through bad times over Jack and she had lived through
them always together with John Pentland, so there had grown up between
them--the mother and the grandfather--a sense of understanding which was
quite beyond speech. Together they had spent so many nights by the side
of the boy, keeping him alive almost by the strength of their united
wills, forcing him to live when, gasping for life, he would have slipped
away easily into death. Together they had kept him in life, because they
both loved him and because he was the last son of the family.
Olivia felt sometimes that Sybil, too, played a part in the never-ending
struggle against death. The girl, like her grandfather, never spoke of
such things, but one could read them in the troubled depths of her
violet eyes. That long, weary struggle was one of the tragedies they
never spoke of at Pentlands, leaving it buried in silence. One said,
“Jack looks well to-day,” smiling, and, “Perhaps the doctors are
wrong.” Sybil was watching her brother now, in that quiet, mysterious
way she had, watching him cautiously lest he discover that she was
watching; for he discovered troubles easily, with the kind of
clairvoyance which comes to people who have always been ill.
They barely talked at all during the lunch. Sybil planned to take her
brother in the trap to ride over the farm and down to the white dunes.
“Higgins is going with us,” she said. “He’s going to show us the new
litter of foxes in the black thicket.”
And Jack said, “It’s a funny thing about Higgins. He always discovers
such things before any one else. He knows when it will be a good day for
fishing and just when it is going to rain. He’s never wrong.”
“No ...” said the grandfather suddenly. “It’s a funny thing. He’s never
wrong ... not in all the years I’ve known him.”
It was the only time he said anything during the meal, and Olivia,
trying to fill in the gaps in the conversation, found it difficult, with
the boy sitting opposite her looking so pale and ill. It seemed to her
sometimes that he had never really been born, that he had always
remained in some way a part of herself. When he was out of her sight,
she had no peace because there was always a gnawing terror that she
might never see him again. And she knew that deep inside the frail body
there was a spirit, a flame, descended from the old man and from
herself, which burned passionately with a desire for life, for riding,
for swimming, for running across the open meadows ... a flame that must
always be smothered. If only he had been like Anson, his father, who
never knew that hunger for life....
“Olivia, my dear....” The old man was speaking. “Will you have your
coffee with me in the library? There is something I want to discuss with
you.”
She knew it then. She had been right. There _was_ something which
troubled him. He always said the same thing when he was faced by some
problem too heavy for his old shoulders. He always said, “Olivia, my
dear.... Will you come into the library?” He never summoned his own son,
or his sister Cassie ... no one but Olivia. Between them they shared
secrets which the others never dreamed of; and when he died, all the
troubles would be hers ... they would be passed on for her to deal with
... those troubles which existed in a family which the world would have
said was rich and respected and quite without troubles.
4
As she left the room to follow him she stopped for a moment to say to
Sybil, “Are you happy, my dear? You’re not sorry that you aren’t going
back to school in Saint-Cloud?”
“No, Mama; why shouldn’t I be happy here? I love it, more than anything
in the world.”
The girl thrust her hands into the pockets of her riding-coat.
“You don’t think I was wrong to send you to France to school ... away
from every one here?”
Sybil laughed and looked at her mother in the frank, half-mocking way
she had when she fancied she had uncovered a plot.
“Are you worrying about marrying me off? I’m only eighteen. I’ve lots of
time.”
“I’m worrying because I think you’ll be so hard to please.”
Again she laughed. “That’s true. That’s why I’m going to take my time.”
“And you’re glad to have Thérèse here?”
“Of course. You know I like Thérèse awfully, Mama.”
“Very well ... run along now. I must speak to your grandfather.”
And the girl went out onto the terrace where Jack stood waiting in the
sun for the trap. He always followed the sun, choosing to sit in it even
in midsummer, as if he were never quite warm enough.
She _was_ worried over Sybil. She had begun to think that perhaps Aunt
Cassie was right when she said that Sybil ought to go to a
boarding-school with the girls she had always known, to grow loud and
noisy and awkward and play hockey and exchange silly notes with the boys
in the boarding-school in the next village. Perhaps it was wrong to have
sent Sybil away to a school where she would meet girls from France and
England and Russia and South America ... half the countries of the
world; a school where, as Aunt Cassie had said bitterly, she would be
forced to associate with the “daughters of dancers and opera singers.”
She knew now that Sybil hadn’t liked the ball any more than Thérèse, who
had run away from it without a word of explanation. Only with Thérèse it
didn’t matter so much, because the dark stubborn head was filled with
all sorts of wild notions about science and painting and weird books on
psychology. There was a loneliness about Thérèse and her mother, Sabine
Callendar, only with them it didn’t matter. They had, too, a hardness, a
sense of derision and scorn which protected them. Sybil hadn’t any such
protections. Perhaps she was even wrong in having made of Sybil a
lady--a lady in the old sense of the word--because there seemed to be no
place for a lady in the scheme of life as it had existed at the dance
the night before. It was perilous, having a lady on one’s hands,
especially a lady who was certain to take life as passionately as Sybil.
She wanted the girl to be happy, without quite understanding that it
was because Sybil seemed the girl she had once been herself, a very part
of herself, the part which had never lived at all.
* * * * *
She found her father-in-law seated at his great mahogany desk in the
high narrow room walled with books which was kept sacred to him, at the
desk from which he managed the farm and watched over a fortune, built up
bit by bit shrewdly, thriftily over three hundred years, a fortune which
he had never brought himself to trust in the hands of his son. It was,
in its gloomy, cold way, a pleasant room, smelling of dogs and apples
and wood-smoke, and sometimes of whisky, for it was here that the old
man retired when, in a kind of baffled frenzy, he drank himself to
insensibility. It was here that he would sometimes sit for a day and a
night, even sleeping in his leather chair, refusing to see any one save
Higgins, who watched over him, and Olivia. And so it was Olivia and
Higgins who alone knew the spectacle of this solitary drinking. The
world and even the family knew very little of it--only the little which
sometimes leaked out from the gossip of servants straying at night along
the dark lanes and hedges about Durham.
He sat with his coffee and a glass of Courvoisier before him while he
smoked, with an air of being lost in some profound worry, for he did not
look up at once when she entered, but sat staring before him in an odd,
enchanted fashion. It was not until she had taken a cigarette from the
silver box and lighted it that he looked up at the sound of the striking
match and, focusing the burning black eyes, said to her, “Jack seems
very well to-day.”
“Yes, better than he has been in a long time.”
“Perhaps, after all, the doctors are wrong.”
Olivia sighed and said quietly, “If we had believed the doctors we
should have lost him long ago.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
She poured her coffee and he murmured, “It’s about Horace Pentland I
wanted to speak. He’s dead. I got the news this morning. He died in
Mentone and now it’s a question whether we shall bring him home here to
be buried in Durham with the rest of the family.”
Olivia was silent for a moment and then, looking up, said, “What do you
think? How long has it been that he has lived in Mentone?”
“It’s nearly thirty years now that I’ve been sending him money to stay
there. He’s only a cousin. Still, we had the same grandfather and he’d
be the first of the family in three hundred years who isn’t buried
here.”
“There was Savina Pentland....”
“Yes.... But she’s buried out there, and she would have been buried here
if it had been possible.”
And he made a gesture in the direction of the sea, beyond the marshes
where the beautiful Savina Pentland, almost a legend now, lay, somewhere
deep down in the soft white sand at the bottom of the ocean.
“Would he want to be buried here?” asked Olivia.
“He wrote and asked me ... a month or two before he died. It seemed to
be on his mind. He put it in a strange way. He wrote that he wanted to
come home.”
Again Olivia was thoughtful for a time. “Strange ...” she murmured
presently, “when people were so cruel to him.”
The lips of the old man stiffened a little.
“It was his own fault....”
“Still ... thirty years is a long time.”
He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. “You mean
that everything may have been forgotten by now?”
Olivia made a little gesture with her white, ringless hands. “Why not?”
“Because people don’t forget things like that ... not in our world, at
any rate.”
Quietly, far back in her mind, Olivia kept trying to imagine this Horace
Pentland whom she had never seen, this shadowy old man, dead now, who
had been exiled for thirty years.
“You have no reason for not wanting him here among all the others?”
“No ... Horace is dead now.... It can’t matter much whether what’s left
of him is buried here or in France.”
“Except, of course, that they may have been kinder to him over there....
They’re not so harsh.”
A silence fell over them, as if in some way the spirit of Horace
Pentland, the sinner whose name was never spoken in the family save
between Olivia and the old man, had returned and stood between them,
waiting to hear what was to be done with all that remained of him on
this earth. It was one of those silences which, descending upon the old
house, sometimes filled Olivia with a vague uneasiness. They had a way
of descending upon the household in the long evenings when all the
family sat reading in the old drawing-room--as if there were figures
unseen who stood watching.
“If he wanted to be buried here,” said Olivia, “I can see no reason why
he should not be.”
“Cassie will object to raking up an old scandal that has been
forgotten.”
“Surely that can’t matter now ... when the poor old man is dead. We can
be kind to him now ... surely we can be kind to him now.”
John Pentland sighed abruptly, a curious, heart-breaking sigh that
seemed to have escaped even his power of steely control; and presently
he said, “I think you are right, Olivia.... I will do as you say ...
only we’ll keep it a secret between us until the time comes when it’s
necessary to speak. And then ... then we’ll have a quiet funeral.”
She would have left him then save that she knew from his manner that
there were other things he wanted to say. He had a way of letting you
know his will without speaking. Somehow, in his presence you felt that
it was impossible to leave until he had dismissed you. He still treated
his own son, who was nearly fifty, as if he were a little boy.
Olivia waited, busying herself by rearranging the late lilacs which
stood in a tall silver vase on the polished mahogany desk.
“They smell good,” he said abruptly. “They’re the last, aren’t they?”
“The last until next spring.”
“Next spring ...” he repeated with an air of speaking to himself. “Next
spring....” And then abruptly, “The other thing was about Sabine. The
nurse tells me _she_ has discovered that Sabine is here.” He made the
family gesture toward the old north wing. “She has asked to see Sabine.”
“Who told her that Sabine had returned? How could she have discovered
it?”
“The nurse doesn’t know. She must have heard some one speaking the name
under her window. The nurse says that people in her condition have
curious ways of discovering such things ... like a sixth sense.”
“Do you want me to ask Sabine? She’d come if I asked her.”
“It would be unpleasant. Besides, I think it might do harm in some way.”
Olivia was silent for a moment. “How? She probably wouldn’t remember
Sabine. When she saw her last, Sabine was a young girl.”
“She’s gotten the idea now that we’re all against her, that we’re
persecuting her in some way.” He coughed and blew a cloud of smoke out
of his thin-drawn lips. “It’s difficult to explain what I mean.... I
mean that Sabine might encourage that feeling ... quite without meaning
to, that Sabine might give her the impression that she was an ally.
There’s something disturbing about Sabine.”
“Anson thinks so, too,” said Olivia softly. “He’s been talking to me
about it.”
“She ought never to have come back here. It’s difficult ... what I am
trying to say. Only I feel that she’s up to some mischief. I think she
hates us all.”
“Not all of us....”
“Not perhaps you. You never belonged here. It’s only those of us who
have always been here.”
“But she’s fond of you....”
“Her father and I were good friends. He was very like her ...
disagreeable and given to speaking unpleasant truths.... He wasn’t a
popular man. Perhaps that’s why she’s friendly toward me ... on account
of him.”
“No, it’s more than that....”
Slowly Olivia felt herself slipping back into that state of confused
enchantment which had overwhelmed her more and more often of late. It
seemed that life grew more and more tenuous and complicated, more
blurred and indistinct, until at times it became simply a morass of
minute problems in which she found herself mired and unable to act. No
one spoke directly any more. It was like living in a world of shadows.
And this old man, her father-in-law, was the greatest puzzle of all,
because it was impossible ever to know how much he understood of what
went on about him, how much he chose to ignore in the belief that by
denying its existence it would cease to exist.
Sitting there, puzzled, she began to pull a leaf from the cluster of
lilacs into tiny bits.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think Sabine is unhappy....”
“No ... not that.... She’s beyond happiness or unhappiness. There’s
something hard in her and unrelenting ... as hard as a cut diamond.
She’s a clever woman and a queer one. She’s one of those strange
creatures that are thrown off now and then by people like us. There’s
nothing else quite like them in the world. They go to strange extremes.
Horace was the same ... in a different, less creditable fashion.”
Olivia looked at him suddenly, astonished by the sudden flash of
penetration in the old man, one of those sudden, quick gleams which led
her to believe that far down, in the depths of his soul, he was far more
profound, far more intelligent, unruly and defiant of tradition than he
ever allowed the world to suppose. It was always the old question. How
much did he know? How much did he not know ... far back, behind the
lined, severe, leathery old face? Or was it a sort of clairvoyance, not
of eternal illness, like Jack’s, but of old age?
“I shall ask Sabine,” she began.
“It’s not necessary at the moment. She appears to have forgotten the
matter temporarily. But she’ll remember it again and then I think it
will be best to humor her, whatever comes. She may not think of it again
for months ... until Sabine has gone.... I only wanted to ask you ... to
consult you, Olivia. I thought you could arrange it.”
She rose and, turning to go, she heard him saying, “_She_ might like
some lilacs in her room.” He hesitated and in a flat, dead voice, added,
“She used to be very fond of flowers.”
Olivia, avoiding the dark eyes, thought, “She used to be very fond of
flowers.... That means forty years ago ... forty long years. Oh, my
God!” But after a second she said simply, “She has taken a dislike to
flowers. She fancies they take up the air and stifle her. The sight of
them is very bad for her.”
“I should have known you’d already thought of it.”
For an instant the old man stood facing her with a fixed and searching
expression which made her feel shy and led her to turn away from him a
little; and then all at once, with an air strangely timid and frightened
in a man so grim in appearance, he took her hand and kissing her on the
forehead murmured, “You’re a good girl, Olivia. They’re right in what
they say of you. You’re a good girl. I don’t know how I should have
managed without you all these years.”
Smiling, she looked at him, and then, touching his hand affectionately,
she went out without speaking again, thinking, as she had thought a
thousand times, what a terrible thing it must be to have been born so
inarticulate and so terrified of feeling as John Pentland. It must be,
she thought, like living forever imprisoned in a shell of steel from
which one might look out and see friends but never touch or know them.
From the doorway she heard a voice behind her, saying almost joyfully:
“The doctors must have been wrong about Jack. You and I together,
Olivia, have defeated them.”
She said, “Yes,” and smiled at him, but when she had turned away again
there was in her mind a strange, almost gruesome thought.
“If only Jack lives until his grandfather is dead, the old man will die
happy. If only he can be kept alive until then....”
She had a strange way of seeing things in the hard light of reality, and
an unreal, lonely childhood had fostered the trait. She had been born
thus, and now as a woman she found that in a way it was less a curse
than a blessing. In a world which survived only by deceiving itself, she
found that seeing the truth and knowing it made her strong. Here,
perhaps, lay the reason why all of them had come to depend upon her. But
there were times, too, when she wanted passionately to be a poor weak
feminine creature, a woman who might turn to her husband and find in him
some one stronger than herself. She had a curious feeling of envy for
Savina Pentland, who was dead before she was born.... Savina Pentland
who had been the beauty of the family, extravagant, reckless, feminine,
who bought strings of pearls and was given to weeping and fainting.
But she (Olivia) had only Anson to lean upon.
* * * * *
After she had gone away the old man sat for a long time smoking and
drinking his brandy, enveloped by a loneliness scarcely more profound
than it had been a little while before when he sat talking with Olivia.
It was his habit to sit thus sometimes for an hour at a time,
unconscious, it seemed, of all the world about him; Olivia had come in
more than once at such moments and gone away again, unwilling to shatter
the enchantment by so much as a single word.
At last, when the cigar had burned to an end, he crushed out the ember
with a short, fierce gesture and, rising, went out of the tall narrow
room and along the corridor that led to the dark stairway in the old
north wing. These steps he had climbed every day since it had become
necessary to keep _her_ in the country the year round ... every day, at
the same hour, step by step his big heavy-shod boots had trod the same
worn stair carpet. It was a journey begun years ago as a kind of
pleasure colored by hope, which for a long time now, bereft of all hope,
had become merely a monotonous dreary duty. It was like a journey of
penance made by some pilgrim on his knees up endless flights of stairs.
For more than twenty years, as far back as Olivia could remember, he had
been absent from the house for a night but twice, and then only on
occasions of life and death. In all that time he had been twice to New
York and never once to the Europe he had not seen since, as a boy, he
had made the grand tour on a plan laid out by old General Curtis ... a
time so remote now that it must have seemed part of another life. In all
those years he had never once escaped from the world which his family
found so perfect and complete and which to him must have seemed always a
little cramped and inadequate. Fate and blood and circumstance, one
might have said, had worn him down bit by bit until in the end he had
come to worship the same gods they worshiped. Now and then he contrived
to escape them for a little while by drinking himself into
insensibility, but always he awakened again to find that nothing had
changed, to discover that his prison was the same. And so, slowly, hope
must have died.
But no one knew, even Olivia, whether he was happy or unhappy; and no
one would ever really know what had happened to him, deep inside, behind
the gray, leathery old face.
The world said, when it thought of him: “There never was such a devoted
husband as John Pentland.”
Slowly and firmly he walked along the narrow hall to the end and there
halted to knock on the white door. He always knocked, for there were
times when the sight of him, entering suddenly, affected her so that she
became hysterical and beyond all control.
In response to the knock, the door was opened gently and professionally
by Miss Egan, an automaton of a nurse--neat, efficient, inhuman and
incredibly starched, whose very smile seemed to come and go by some
mechanical process, like the sounds made by squeezing a mechanical doll.
Only it was impossible to imagine squeezing anything so starched and
jagged as the red-faced Miss Egan. It was a smile which sprang into
existence upon sight of any member of the family, a smile of false
humility which said, “I know very well that you cannot do without
me”--the smile of a woman well enough content to be paid three times the
wages of an ordinary nurse. In three or four more years she would have
enough saved to start a sanatorium of her own.
Fixing her smile, she faced the old man, saying, “She seems quite well
to-day ... very quiet.”
The whole hallway had been flooded at the opening of the door by a thick
and complicated odor arising from innumerable medicines that stood row
upon row in the obscurity of the dark room. The old man stepped inside,
closing the door quickly behind him, for she was affected by too much
light. She could not bear to have a door or a window open near her; even
on this bright day the drawn shades kept the room in darkness.
She had got the idea somehow that there were people outside who waited
to leer at her ... hundreds of them all pressing their faces against the
panes to peep into her bedroom. There were days when she could not be
quieted until the window-shades were covered by thick layers of black
cloth. She would not rise from her bed until nightfall lest the faces
outside might see her standing there in her nightdress.
It was only when darkness had fallen that the nurse was able by means of
trickery and wheedling to air the room, and so it smelled horribly of
the medicines she never took, but kept ranged about her, row upon row,
like the fetishes of witch-doctors. In this they humored her as they had
humored her in shutting out the sunlight, because it was the only way
they could keep her quiet and avoid sending her away to some place where
she would have been shut behind bars. And this John Pentland would not
even consider.
When he entered she was lying in the bed, her thin, frail body barely
outlined beneath the bedclothes ... the mere shadow of a woman who must
once have been pretty in a delicate way. But nothing remained now of the
beauty save the fine modeling of the chin and nose and brow. She lay
there, a queer, unreal old woman, with thin white hair, skin like
parchment and a silly, vacant face as unwrinkled as that of a child. As
he seated himself beside her, the empty, round blue eyes opened a little
and stared at him without any sign of recognition. He took one of the
thin, blue-veined hands in his, but it only lay there, lifeless, while
he sat, silent and gentle, watching her.
Once he spoke, calling her wistfully by name, “Agnes”; but there was no
sign of an answer, not so much as a faint flickering of the white,
transparent lids.
And so for an eternity he sat thus in the thick darkness, enveloped by
the sickly odor of medicines, until he was roused by a knock at the door
and the sudden glare of daylight as it opened and Miss Egan, fixing her
flashing and teethy smile, came in and said: “The fifteen minutes is up,
Mr. Pentland.”
When the door had closed behind him he went away again, slowly,
thoughtfully, down the worn stairs and out into the painfully brilliant
sunlight of the bright New England spring. Crossing the green terrace,
bordered with great clumps of iris and peonies and a few late tulips, he
made his way to the stable-yard, where Higgins had left the red mare in
charge of a Polish boy who did odd tasks about the farm. The mare, as
beautiful and delicate as a fine steel spring, stood nervously pawing
the gravel and tossing her handsome head. The boy, a great lout with a
shock of yellow hair, stood far away from her holding the reins at arm’s
length.
At the sight of the two the old man laughed and said, “You mustn’t let
her know you’re afraid of her, Ignaz.”
The boy gave up the reins and retired to a little distance, still
watching the mare resentfully. “Well, she tried to bite me!” he said
sullenly.
Quickly, with a youthful agility, John Pentland swung himself to her
back ... quickly enough to keep her from sidling away from him. There
was a short, fierce struggle between the rider and the horse, and in a
shower of stones they sped away down the lane that led across the
meadows, past the thicket of black pines and the abandoned gravel-pit,
toward the house of Mrs. Soames.
CHAPTER IV
In the solid corner of the world which surrounded Durham, Aunt Cassie
played the rôle of an unofficial courier who passed from house to house,
from piazza to piazza, collecting and passing on the latest bits of
news. When one saw a low cloud of dust moving across the brilliant New
England sky above the hedges and stone walls of the countryside, one
could be certain that it masked the progress of Cassie Struthers on her
daily round of calls. She went always on foot, because she detested
motors and was terrified of horses; one might see her coming from a
great distance, dressed always in dingy black, tottering along very
briskly (for a woman of her age and well-advertised infirmities). One
came to expect her arrival at a certain hour, for she was, unless there
arose in her path some calamity or piece of news of unusual interest, a
punctual woman whose life was as carefully ordered as the vast house in
which she lived with the queer Aunt Bella.
It was a great box of a dwelling built by the late Mr. Struthers in the
days of cupolas and gazebos on land given him by Aunt Cassie’s
grandfather on the day of her wedding. Inside it was furnished with a
great profusion of plush tassels and antimacassars, all kept with the
neatness and rigidity of a museum. There were never any cigar ashes on
the floor, nor any dust in the corners, for Aunt Cassie followed her
servants about with the eye of a fussy old sergeant inspecting his
barracks. Poor Miss Peavey, who grew more and more dowdy and careless as
old age began to settle over her, led a life of constant peril, and was
forced to build a little house near the stables to house her
Pomeranians and her Siamese cats. For Aunt Cassie could not abide the
thought of “the animals dirtying up the house.” Even the “retiring room”
of the late Mr. Struthers had been converted since his death into a
museum, spotless and purified of tobacco and whisky, where his chair sat
before his desk, turned away from it a little, as if his spirit were
still seated there. On the desk lay his pipe (as he had left it) and the
neat piles of paper (carefully dusted each day but otherwise
undisturbed) which he had put there with his own hand on the morning
they found him seated on the chair, his head fallen back a little, as if
asleep. And in the center of the desk lay two handsomely bound
volumes--“Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks and Talks in New
England Churchyards”--which he had written in these last sad years when
his life seemed slowly to fade from him ... the years in which Aunt
Cassie seemed rapidly to recover the wiry strength and health for which
she had been famous as a girl.
The house, people said, had been built by Mr. Struthers in the
expectation of a large family, but it had remained great and silent of
children’s voices as a tomb since the day it was finished, for Aunt
Cassie had never been strong until it was too late for her to bear him
heirs.
Sabine Callendar had a whole set of theories about the house and about
the married life of Aunt Cassie, but they were theories which she kept,
in her way, entirely to herself, waiting and watching until she was
certain of them. There was a hatred between the two women that was
implacable and difficult to define, an emotion almost of savagery which
concealed itself beneath polite phrases and casual observations of an
acid character. They encountered each other more frequently than Aunt
Cassie would have wished, for Sabine, upon her return to Durham, took up
Aunt Cassie’s habit of going from house to house on foot in search of
news and entertainment. They met in drawing-rooms, on piazzas, and
sometimes in the very dusty lanes, greeting each other with smiles and
vicious looks. They had become rather like two hostile cats watching
each other for days at a time, stealthily. Sabine, Aunt Cassie confided
in Olivia, made her nervous.
Still, it was Aunt Cassie who had been the first caller at Brook Cottage
after the arrival of Sabine. The younger woman had seen her approach,
enveloped in a faint cloud of dust, from the windows of Brook Cottage,
and the sight filled her with an inexpressible delight. The spare old
lady had come along so briskly, almost with impatience, filled with
delight (Sabine believed) at having an excuse now to trespass on
O’Hara’s land and see what he had done to the old cottage. And Sabine
believed, too, that she came to discover what life had done to “dear Mr.
Struthers’ niece, Sabine Callendar.” She came as the Official Welcomer
of the Community, with hope in her heart that she would find Sabine a
returned prodigal, a wrecked woman, ravaged by time and experience, who
for twenty years had ignored them all and now returned, a broken and
humbled creature, hungry for kindness.
The sight set fire to a whole train of memories in Sabine ... memories
which penetrated deep into her childhood when with her father she had
lived in the old house that once stood where O’Hara’s new one raised its
bright chimneys; memories of days when she had run off by herself to
play in the tangled orchard grass among the bleeding-hearts and irises
that surrounded this same Brook Cottage where she stood watching the
approach of Aunt Cassie. Only, in those days Brook Cottage had been a
ruin of a place, with empty windows and sagging doors, ghostly and
half-hidden by a shaggy tangle of lilacs and syringas, and now it stood
glistening with new paint, the lilacs all neatly clipped and pruned.
There was something in the sight of the old woman’s nervous, active
figure that struck deep down into a past which Sabine, with the passing
of years, had almost succeeded in forgetting; and now it all came back
again, sharply and with a kind of stabbing pain, so that she had a
sudden odd feeling of having become a little girl again ... plain,
red-haired, freckled and timid, who stood in terror of Aunt Cassie and
was always being pulled here and there by a thousand aunts and uncles
and cousins because she _would_ not be turned into their idea of what a
nice little girl ought to be. It was as if the whole past were
concentrated in the black figure of the old lady who had been the
ring-leader, the viceroy, of all a far-flung tribe, an old woman who had
been old even twenty years earlier, lying always on a sofa under a
shawl, issuing her edicts, pouring out her ample sympathies, her bitter
criticisms. And here she was, approaching briskly, as if the death of
Mr. Struthers had somehow released her from bonds which had chafed for
too long.
Watching her, one incident after another flashed through the quick, hard
brain of Sabine, all recreated with a swift, astounding clarity--the day
when she had run off to escape into the world and been found by old John
Pentland hiding in the thicket of white birches happily eating
blueberries. (She could see his countenance now, stern with its
disapproval of such wild behavior, but softening, too, at the sight of
the grubby, freckled plain face stained with blueberry juice.) And the
return of the captive, when she was surrounded by aunts who dressed her
in a clean frock and forced her to sit in the funereal spare bedroom
with a New Testament on her knees until she “felt that she could come
out and behave like a nice, well-brought-up little girl.” She could see
the aunts pulling and fussing at her and saying, “What a shame she
didn’t take after her mother in looks!” and, “She’ll have a hard time
with such plain, straight red hair.”
And there was, too, the memory of that day when Anson Pentland, a
timid, spiritless little Lord Fauntleroy of a boy, fell into the river
and would have been drowned save for his cousin Sabine, who dragged him
out, screaming and drenched, only to receive for herself all the
scolding for having led him into mischief. And the times when she had
been punished for having asked frank and simple questions which she
ought not to have asked.
It was difficult to remember any happiness until the day when her father
died and she was sent to New York, a girl of twenty, knowing very little
of anything and nothing whatever of such things as love and marriage, to
live with an uncle in a tall narrow house on Murray Hill. It was on that
day (she saw it now with a devastating clarity as she stood watching the
approach of Aunt Cassie) that her life had really begun. Until then her
existence had been only a confused and tormented affair in which there
was very little happiness. It was only later that reality had come to
her, painfully, even tragically, in a whole procession of events which
had made her slowly into this hard, worldly, cynical woman who found
herself, without quite knowing why, back in a world she hated, standing
at the window of Brook Cottage, a woman tormented by an immense and
acutely living curiosity about people and the strange tangles which
their lives sometimes assumed.
She had been standing by the window thinking back into the past with
such a fierce intensity that she quite forgot the approach of Aunt
Cassie and started suddenly at the sound of the curious, familiar thin
voice, amazingly unchanged, calling from the hallway, “Sabine! Sabine
dear! It’s your Aunt Cassie! Where are you?” as if she had never left
Durham at all, as if nothing had changed in twenty years.
At sight of her, the old lady came forward with little fluttering cries
to fling her arms about her late husband’s niece. Her manner was that of
a shepherd receiving a lost sheep, a manner filled with forgiveness and
pity and condescension. The tears welled easily into her eyes and
streamed down her face.
Sabine permitted herself, frigidly, to be embraced, and said, “But you
don’t look a day older, Aunt Cassie. You look stronger than ever.” It
was a remark which somehow set the whole tone of the relationship
between them, a remark which, though it sounded sympathetic and even
complimentary, was a harsh thing to say to a woman who had cherished all
her life the tradition of invalidism. It was harsh, too, because it was
true. Aunt Cassie at forty-seven had been as shriveled and dried as she
was now, twenty years later.
The old woman said, “My dear girl, I am miserable ... miserable.” And
drying the tears that streamed down her face, she added, “It won’t be
long now until I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine wanted suddenly to laugh, at the picture of Aunt Cassie entering
Paradise to rejoin a husband whom she had always called, even in the
intimacy of married life, “Mr. Struthers.” She kept thinking that Mr.
Struthers might not find the reunion so pleasant as his wife
anticipated. She had always held a strange belief that Mr. Struthers had
chosen death as the best way out.
And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused by
Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement. Aunt Cassie could never bring
herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She
must say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine said, “Oh, no.... Oh, no.... Don’t say that.”
“I don’t sleep any more. I barely close my eyes at night.”
She had seated herself now and was looking about her, absorbing
everything in the room, the changes made by the dreadful O’Hara, the
furniture he had bought for the house. But most of all she was studying
Sabine, devouring her with sidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine,
knowing her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent
shock. She had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she
had found instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman,
superbly dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight
red hair the aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin
slippers--a woman who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand
and subdued it, who was in a way complete.
“Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years
you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you.” And again the
easy tears welled up.
(“Oh,” thought Sabine, “you don’t catch me that way. You won’t put me
back where I once was. You won’t even have a chance to meddle in my
life.”)
Aloud she said, “It’s a pity I’ve always been so far away.”
“But I’ve thought of you, my dear.... I’ve thought of you. Scarcely a
night passes when I don’t say to myself before going to sleep, ‘There is
poor Sabine out in the world, turning her back on all of us who love
her.’” She sighed abysmally. “I have thought of you, dear. I’ve prayed
for you in the long nights when I have never closed an eye.”
And Sabine, talking on half-mechanically, discovered slowly that, in
spite of everything, she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie. She was no
longer a shy, frightened, plain little girl; she even began to sense a
challenge, a combat which filled her with a faint sense of warmth. She
kept thinking, “She really hasn’t changed at all. She still wants to
reach out and take possession of me and my life. She’s like an octopus
reaching out and seizing each member of the family, arranging
everything.” And she saw Aunt Cassie now, after so many years, in a new
light. It seemed to her that there was something glittering and hard and
a little sinister beneath all the sighing and tears and easy sympathy.
Perhaps she (Sabine) was the only one in all the family who had escaped
the reach of those subtle, insinuating tentacles.... She had run away.
Meanwhile Aunt Cassie had swept from a vivid and detailed description of
the passing of Mr. Struthers into a catalogue of neighborhood and family
calamities, of deaths, of broken troths, financial disasters, and the
appearance on the horizon of the “dreadful O’Hara.” She reproached
Sabine for having sold her land to such an outsider. And as she talked
on and on she grew less and less human and more and more like some
disembodied, impersonal force of nature. Sabine, watching her with
piercing green eyes, found her a little terrifying. She had sharpened
and hardened with age.
She discussed the divorces which had occurred in Boston, and at length,
leaning forward and touching Sabine’s hand with her thin, nervous one,
she said brokenly: “I felt for you in your trouble, Sabine. I never
wrote you because it would have been so painful. I see now that I evaded
my duty. But I felt for you.... I tried to put myself in your place. I
tried to imagine dear Mr. Struthers being unfaithful to me ... but, of
course, I couldn’t. He was a saint.” She blew her nose and repeated with
passion, as if to herself, “A saint!”
(“Yes,” thought Sabine, “a saint ... if ever there was one.”) She saw
that Aunt Cassie was attacking her now from a new point. She was trying
to pity her. By being full of pity the old woman would try to break down
her defenses and gain possession of her.
Sabine’s green eyes took one hard, glinting look. “Did you ever see my
husband?” she asked.
“No,” said Aunt Cassie, “but I’ve heard a great deal of him. I’ve been
told how you suffered.”
Sabine looked at her with a queer, mocking expression. “Then you’ve been
told wrongly. He is a fascinating man. I did not suffer. I assure you
that I would rather have shared him with fifty other women than have had
any one of the men about here all to myself.”
There was a frank immorality in this statement which put Aunt Cassie to
rout, bag and baggage. She merely stared, finding nothing to say in
reply to such a speech. Clearly, in all her life she had never heard any
one say a thing so bald and so frank, so completely naked of all
pretense of gentility.
Sabine went on coldly, pushing her assault to the very end. “I divorced
him at last, not because he was unfaithful to me, but because there was
another woman who wanted to marry him ... a woman whom I respect and
like ... a woman who is still my friend. Understand that I loved him
passionately ... in a very fleshly way. One couldn’t help it. I wasn’t
the only woman.... He was a kind of devil, but a very fascinating one.”
The old woman was a little stunned but not by any means defeated. Sabine
saw a look come into her eyes, a look which clearly said, “So this is
what the world has done to my poor, dear, innocent little Sabine!” At
last she said with a sigh, “I find it an amazing world. I don’t know
what it is coming to.”
“Nor I,” replied Sabine with an air of complete agreement and sympathy.
She understood that the struggle was not yet finished, for Aunt Cassie
had a way of putting herself always in an impregnable position, of
wrapping herself in layer after layer of sighs and sympathy, of charity
and forgiveness, of meekness and tears, so that in the end there was no
way of suddenly tearing them aside and saying, “There you are ... naked
at last, a horrible meddling old woman!” And Sabine kept thinking, too,
that if Aunt Cassie had lived in the days of her witch-baiting ancestor,
Preserved Pentland, she would have been burned for a witch.
And all the while Sabine had been suffering, quietly, deep inside,
behind the frankly painted face ... suffering in a way which no one in
the world had ever suspected; for it was like tearing out her heart, to
talk thus of Richard Callendar, even to speak his name.
Aloud she said, “And how is Mrs. Pentland.... I mean Olivia ... not my
cousin.... I know how _she_ is ... no better.”
“No better.... It is one of those things which I can never
understand.... Why God should have sent such a calamity to a good man
like my brother.”
“But Olivia ...” began Sabine, putting an end abruptly to what was
clearly the prelude to a pious monologue.
“Oh!... Olivia,” replied Aunt Cassie, launching into an account of the
young Mrs. Pentland. “Olivia is an angel ... an angel, a blessing of God
sent to my poor brother. But she’s not been well lately. She’s been
rather sharp with me ... even with poor Miss Peavey, who is so
sensitive. I can’t imagine what has come over her.”
It seemed that the strong, handsome Olivia was suffering from nerves.
She was, Aunt Cassie said, unhappy about something, although she could
not see why Olivia shouldn’t be happy ... a woman with everything in the
world.
“Everything?” echoed Sabine. “Has any one in the world got everything?”
“It is Olivia’s fault if she hasn’t everything. All the materials are
there. She has a good husband ... a husband who never looks at other
women.”
“Nor at his own wife either,” interrupted Sabine. “I know all about
Anson. I grew up with him.”
Aunt Cassie saw fit to ignore this. “She’s rich,” she said, resuming the
catalogue of Olivia’s blessings.
And again Sabine interrupted, “But what does money mean Aunt Cassie? In
our world one is rich and that’s the end of it. One takes it for
granted. When one isn’t rich any longer, one simply slips out of it. It
has very little to do with happiness....”
The strain was beginning to show on Aunt Cassie. “You’d find out if you
weren’t rich,” she observed with asperity, “if your father and
great-grandfather hadn’t taken care of their money.” She recovered
herself and made a deprecating gesture. “But don’t think I’m criticizing
dear Olivia. She is the best, the most wonderful woman.” She began to
wrap herself once more in kindliness and charity and forgiveness. “Only
she seems to me to be a little queer lately.”
Sabine’s artificially crimson mouth took on a slow smile. “It would be
too bad if the Pentland family drove two wives insane--one after the
other.”
Again Aunt Cassie came near to defeat by losing her composure. She
snorted, and Sabine helped her out by asking: “And Anson?” ironically.
“What is dear Anson doing?”
She told him of Anson’s great work, “The Pentland Family and the
Massachusetts Bay Colony” and of its immense value as a contribution to
the history of the nation; and when she had finished with that, she
turned to Jack’s wretched health, saying in a low, melancholy voice,
“It’s only a matter of time, you know.... At least, so the doctors
say.... With a heart like that it’s only a matter of time.” The tears
came again.
“And yet,” Sabine said slowly, “You say that Olivia has everything.”
“Well,” replied Aunt Cassie, “perhaps not everything.”
Before she left she inquired for Sabine’s daughter and was told that she
had gone over to Pentlands to see Sybil.
“They went to the same school in France,” said Sabine. “They were
friends there.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I was against Sybil’s going abroad to school.
It fills a girl’s head with queer ideas ... especially a school like
that where any one could go. Since she’s home, Sybil behaves very
queerly.... I think it’ll stand in the way of her success in Boston. The
boys don’t like girls who are different.”
“Perhaps,” said Sabine, “she may marry outside of Boston. Men aren’t the
same everywhere. Even in Boston there must be one or two who don’t refer
to women as ‘Good old So-and-so.’ Even in Boston there must be men who
like women who are well dressed ... women who are ladies....”
Aunt Cassie began to grow angry again, but Sabine swept over her. “Don’t
be insulted, Aunt Cassie. I only mean ladies in the old-fashioned,
glamorous sense..... Besides,” she continued, “whom could she marry who
wouldn’t be a cousin or a connection of some sort?”
“She ought to marry here ... among the people she’s always known.
There’s a Mannering boy who would be a good match, and James Thorne’s
youngest son.”
Sabine smiled. “So you have plans for her already. You’ve settled it?”
“Of course, nothing is settled. I’m only thinking of it with Sybil’s
welfare in view. If she married one of those boys she’d know what she
was getting. She’d know that she was marrying a gentleman.”
“Perhaps ...” said Sabine. “Perhaps.” Somehow a devil had taken
possession of her and she added softly, “There was, of course, Horace
Pentland.... One can never be quite sure.” (She never forgot anything,
Sabine.)
And at the same moment she saw, standing outside the door that opened on
the terrace next to the marshes, a solid, dark, heavy figure which she
recognized with a sudden feeling of delight as O’Hara. He had been
walking across the fields with the wiry little Higgins, who had left him
and continued on his way down the lane in the direction of Pentlands.
At the sight of him, Aunt Cassie made every sign of an attempt to escape
quickly, but Sabine said in a voice ominous with sweetness, “You must
meet Mr. O’Hara. I think you’ve never met him. He’s a charming man.” And
she placed herself in such a position that it was impossible for the old
woman to escape without losing every vestige of dignity.
Then Sabine called gently, “Come in, Mr. O’Hara.... Mrs. Struthers is
here and wants so much to meet her new neighbor.”
The door opened and O’Hara stepped in, a swarthy, rather solidly built
man of perhaps thirty-five, with a shapely head on which the vigorous
black hair was cropped close, and with blue eyes that betrayed his Irish
origin by the half-hidden sparkle of amusement at this move of Sabine’s.
He had a strong jaw and full, rather sensual, lips and a curious sense
of great physical strength, as if all his clothes were with difficulty
modeled to the muscles that lay underneath. He wore no hat, and his skin
was a dark tan, touched at the cheek-bones by the dull flush of health
and good blood.
He was, one would have said at first sight, a common, vulgar man in that
narrow-jawed world about Durham, a man, perhaps, who had come by his
muscles as a dock-laborer. Sabine had thought him vulgar in the
beginning, only to succumb in the end to a crude sort of power which
placed him above the realm of such distinctions. And she was a shrewd
woman, too, devoted passionately to the business of getting at the
essence of people; she knew that vulgarity had nothing to do with a man
who had eyes so shrewd and full of mockery.
He came forward quietly and with a charming air of deference in which
there was a faint suspicion of nonsense, a curious shadow of vulgarity,
only one could not be certain whether he was not being vulgar by
deliberation.
“It is a great pleasure,” he said. “Of course, I have seen Mrs.
Struthers many times ... at the horse shows ... the whippet races.”
Aunt Cassie was drawn up, stiff as a poker, with an air of having found
herself unexpectedly face to face with a rattlesnake.
“I have had the same experience,” she said. “And of course I’ve seen all
the improvements you have made here on the farm.” The word
“improvements” she spoke with a sort of venom in it, as if it had been
instead a word like “arson.”
“We’ll have some tea,” observed Sabine. “Sit down, Aunt Cassie.”
But Aunt Cassie did not unbend. “I promised Olivia to be back at
Pentlands for tea,” she said. “And I am late already.” Pulling on her
black gloves, she made a sudden dip in the direction of O’Hara. “We
shall probably see each other again, Mr. O’Hara, since we are
neighbors.”
“Indeed, I hope so....”
Then she kissed Sabine again and murmured, “I hope, my dear, that you
will come often to see me, now that you’ve come back to us. Make my
house your own home.” She turned to O’Hara, finding a use for him
suddenly in her warfare against Sabine. “You know, Mr. O’Hara, she is a
traitor, in her way. She was raised among us and then went away for
twenty years. She hasn’t any loyalty in her.”
She made the speech with a stiff air of playfulness, as if, of course,
she were only making a joke and the speech meant nothing at all. Yet the
air was filled with a cloud of implications. It was the sort of tactics
in which she excelled.
Sabine went with her to the door, and when she returned she discovered
O’Hara standing by the window, watching the figure of Aunt Cassie as she
moved indignantly down the road in the direction of Pentlands. Sabine
stood there for a moment, studying the straight, strong figure outlined
against the light, and she got suddenly a curious sense of the enmity
between him and the old woman. They stood, the two of them, in a strange
way as the symbols of two great forces--the one negative, the other
intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of
decay, the other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever
reconcile them. According to the scheme of things, they would be
implacable enemies to the end. But Sabine had no doubts as to the final
victor; the same scheme of things showed small respect for all that Aunt
Cassie stood for. That was one of the wisdoms Sabine had learned since
she had escaped from Durham into the uncompromising realities of the
great world.
When she spoke, she said in a noncommittal sort of voice, “Mrs.
Struthers is a remarkable woman.”
And O’Hara, turning, looked at her with a sudden glint of humor in his
blue eyes. “Extraordinary ... I’m sure of it.”
“And a powerful woman,” said Sabine. “Wise as a serpent and gentle as a
dove. It is never good to underestimate such strength. And now.... How
do you like your tea?”
* * * * *
He took no tea but contented himself with munching a bit of toast and
afterward smoking a cigar, clearly pleased with himself in a naïve way
in the rôle of landlord coming to inquire of his tenant whether
everything was satisfactory. He had a liking for this hard, clever woman
who was now only a tenant of the land--his land--which she had once
owned. When he thought of it--that he, Michael O’Hara, had come to own
this farm in the midst of the fashionable and dignified world of
Durham--there was something incredible in the knowledge, something which
never ceased to warm him with a strong sense of satisfaction. By merely
turning his head, he could see in the mirror the reflection of the long
scar on his temple, marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a
youthful fight along the India Wharf. He, Michael O’Hara, without
education save that which he had given himself, without money, without
influence, had raised himself to this position before his thirty-sixth
birthday. In the autumn he would be a candidate for Congress, certain of
election in the back Irish districts. He, Michael O’Hara, was on his way
to being one of the great men of New England, a country which had once
been the tight little paradise of people like the Pentlands.
Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.
Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his
enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her
mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over
and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a
microscope. She was finding out all about him; and he understood that,
for it was a trick in which he, himself, was well-practised. It was by
such methods that he had got ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too,
that she should have come out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could
be so utterly different from it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the
course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible
which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of
mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the
door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he
himself had made long since ... that there is nothing of such force as
the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so
invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the
life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was
like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.
They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of
understanding unusual in two people who had known each other for so
short a time; they spoke of the farm, of Pentlands, of the mills and the
Poles in Durham, of the country as it had been in the days when Sabine
was a child. And all the while he had that sense of her weighing and
watching him, of feeling out the faint echo of a brogue in his speech
and the rather hard, nasal quality that remained from those days along
India Wharf and the memories of a ne’er-do-well, superstitious Irish
father.
He could not have known that she was a woman who included among her
friends men and women of a dozen nationalities, who lived a life among
the clever, successful people of the world ... the architects, the
painters, the politicians, the scientists. He could not have known the
ruthless rule she put up against tolerating any but people who were
“complete.” He could have known nothing of her other life in Paris, and
London, and New York, which had nothing to do with the life in Durham
and Boston. And yet he did know.... He saw that, despite the great
difference in their worlds, there was a certain kinship between them,
that they had both come to look upon the world as a pie from which any
plum might be drawn if one only knew the knack.
And Sabine, on her side, not yet quite certain about casting aside all
barriers, was slowly reaching the same understanding. There was no love
or sentimentality in the spark that flashed between them. She was more
than ten years older than O’Hara and had done with such things long ago.
It was merely a recognition of one strong person by another.
It was O’Hara who first took advantage of the bond. In the midst of the
conversation, he had turned the talk rather abruptly to Pentlands.
“I’ve never been there and I know very little of the life,” he said,
“but I’ve watched it from a distance and it interests me. It’s like
something out of a dream, completely dead ... dead all save for young
Mrs. Pentland and Sybil.”
Sabine smiled. “You know Sybil, then?”
“We ride together every morning.... We met one morning by chance along
the path by the river and since then we’ve gone nearly every day.”
“She’s a charming girl.... She went to school in France with my
daughter, Thérèse. I saw a great deal of her then.”
Far back in her mind the thought occurred to her that there would be
something very amusing in the prospect of Sybil married to O’Hara. It
would produce such an uproar with Anson and Aunt Cassie and the other
relatives.... A Pentland married to an Irish Roman Catholic politician!
“She is like her mother, isn’t she?” asked O’Hara, sitting forward a bit
on his chair. He had a way of sitting thus, in the tense, quiet
alertness of a cat.
“Very like her mother.... Her mother is a remarkable woman ... a
charming woman ... also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things,
a really good and generous woman.”
“I’ve thought that.... I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to
help me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she
had a passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse ... though she scarcely
knew me. She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to
know her. But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I
haven’t seen her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me.
Sometimes I feel sorry for her.... It must be a queer life for a woman
like that ... young and beautiful.”
“She has a great deal to occupy her at Pentlands. And it’s true that
it’s not a very fascinating life. Still, I’m sure she couldn’t bear
being pitied.... She’s the last woman in the world to want pity.”
Curiously, O’Hara flushed, the red mounting slowly beneath the
dark-tanned skin.
“I thought,” he said a little sadly, “that her husband or Mrs. Struthers
might have raised objections.... I know how they feel toward me. There’s
no use pretending not to know.”
“It is quite possible,” said Sabine.
There was a sudden embarrassing silence, which gave Sabine time to pull
her wits together and organize a thousand sudden thoughts and
impressions. She was beginning to understand, bit by bit, the real
reasons of their hatred for O’Hara, the reasons which lay deep down
underneath, perhaps so deep that none of them ever saw them for what
they were.
And then out of the silence she heard the voice of O’Hara saying, in a
queer, hushed way, “I mean to ask something of you ... something that
may sound ridiculous. I don’t pretend that it isn’t, but I mean to ask
it anyway.”
For a moment he hesitated and then, rising quickly, he stood looking
away from her out of the door, toward the distant blue marshes and the
open sea. She fancied that he was trembling a little, but she could not
be certain. What she did know was that he made an immense and heroic
effort, that for a moment he, a man who never did such things, placed
himself in a position where he would be defenseless and open to being
cruelly hurt; and for the moment all the recklessness seemed to flow out
of him and in its place there came a queer sadness, almost as if he felt
himself defeated in some way....
He said, “What I mean to ask you is this.... Will you ask me sometimes
here to the cottage when she will be here too?” He turned toward her
suddenly and added, “It will mean a great deal to me ... more than you
can imagine.”
She did not answer him at once, but sat watching him with a poorly
concealed intensity; and presently, flicking the cigarette ashes
casually from her gown, she asked, “And do you think it would be quite
moral of me?”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her in astonishment, as if he
had expected her, least of all people in the world, to ask such a thing.
“It might,” he said, “make us both a great deal happier.”
“Perhaps ... perhaps not. It’s not so simple as that. Besides, it isn’t
happiness that one places first at Pentlands.”
“No.... Still....” He made a sudden vigorous gesture, as if to sweep
aside all objections.
“You’re a queer man.... I’ll see what can be done.”
He thanked her and went out shyly without another word, to stride across
the meadows, his black head bent thoughtfully, in the direction of his
new bright chimneys. At his heels trotted the springer, which had lain
waiting for him outside the door. There was something about the robust
figure, crossing the old meadow through the blue twilight, that carried
a note of lonely sadness. The self-confidence, the assurance, seemed to
have melted away in some mysterious fashion. It was almost as if one man
had entered the cottage a little while before and another, a quite
different man, had left it just now. Only one thing, Sabine saw, could
have made the difference, and that was the name of Olivia.
* * * * *
When he had disappeared Sabine went up to her room overlooking the sea
and lay there for a long time thinking. She was by nature an indolent
woman, especially at times when her brain worked with a fierce activity.
It was working thus now, in a kind of fever, confused and yet
tremendously clear; for the visits from Aunt Cassie and O’Hara had
ignited her almost morbid passion for vicarious experience. She had a
sense of being on the brink of some calamity which, beginning long ago
in a hopeless tangle of origins and motives, was ready now to break
forth with the accumulated force of years.
It was only now that she began to understand a little what it was that
had drawn her back to a place which held memories so unhappy as those
haunting the whole countryside of Durham. She saw that it must have been
all the while a desire for vindication, a hunger to show them that, in
spite of everything, of the straight red hair and the plain face, the
silly ideas with which they had filled her head, in spite even of her
unhappiness over her husband, she had made of her life a successful,
even a brilliant, affair. She had wanted to show them that she stood
aloof now and impregnable, quite beyond their power to curb or to injure
her. And for a moment she suspected that the half-discerned motive was
an even stronger thing, akin perhaps to a desire for vengeance; for she
held this world about Durham responsible for the ruin of her happiness.
She knew now, as a worldly woman of forty-six, that if she had been
brought up knowing life for what it was, she might never have lost the
one man who had ever roused a genuine passion in a nature so hard and
dry.
It was all confused and tormented and vague, yet the visit of Aunt
Cassie, filled with implications and veiled attempts to humble her, had
cleared the air enormously.
And behind the closed lids, the green eyes began to see a whole
procession of calamities which lay perhaps within her power to create.
She began to see how it might even be possible to bring the whole world
of Pentlands down about their heads in a collapse which could create
only freedom and happiness to Olivia and her daughter. And it was these
two alone for whom she had any affection; the others might be damned,
gloriously damned, while she stood by without raising a finger.
She began to see where the pieces of the puzzle lay, the wedges which
might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world
that once more surrounded her.
Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of
being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of
power, of having all the tools at hand, of being the _dea ex machinâ_ of
the calamity.
She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain
behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile
weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the
family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the
end even money could not save them. There came a time when a great
fortune might be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.
* * * * *
She was still lying there when Thérèse came in--a short, plain, rather
stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead.
She was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired
unhappy little girl had been so many times in that far-off,
half-forgotten childhood.
“Where have you been?” she asked indifferently, for there was always a
curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.
“Catching frogs to dissect,” said Thérèse. “They’re damned scarce and I
slipped into the river.”
Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance of
marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw
that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found
satisfaction in the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse’s life so that
no one could ever hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer
nomadic life they had led together, meeting all sorts of men and women
who were, in Sabine’s curious sense of the word, “complete,” the girl
had pierced her way somehow to the bottom of things. She was building
her young life upon a rock, so that she could afford to feel contempt
for the very forces which long ago had hurt her mother. She might, like
O’Hara, be suddenly humbled by love; but that, Sabine knew, was a
glorious thing well worth suffering.
She knew it each time that she looked at her child and saw the clear
gray eyes of the girl’s father looking out of the dark face with the
same proud look of indifferent confidence which had fascinated her
twenty years ago. So long as Thérèse was alive, she would never be able
wholly to forget him.
“Go wash yourself,” she said. “Old Mr. Pentland and Olivia and Mrs.
Soames are coming to dine and play bridge.”
As she dressed for dinner she no longer asked herself, “Why did I ever
imagine Thérèse might find a husband here? What ever induced me to come
back here to be bored all summer long?”
She had forgotten all that. She began to see that the summer held
prospects of diversion. It might even turn into a fascinating game. She
knew that her return had nothing to do with Thérèse’s future; she had
been drawn back into Durham by some vague but overwhelming desire for
mischief.
CHAPTER V
1
When Anson Pentland came down from the city in the evening, Olivia was
always there to meet him dutifully and inquire about the day. The
answers were always the same: “No, there was not much doing in town,”
and, “It was very hot,” or, “I made a discovery to-day that will be of
great use to me in the book.”
Then after a bath he would appear in tweeds to take his exercise in the
garden, pottering about mildly and peering closely with his near-sighted
blue eyes at little tags labeled “General Pershing” or “Caroline
Testout” or “Poincaré” or “George Washington” which he tied carefully on
the new dahlias and roses and smaller shrubs. And, more often than not,
the gardener would spend half the next morning removing the tags and
placing them on the proper plants, for Anson really had no interest in
flowers and knew very little about them. The tagging was only a part of
his passion for labeling things; it made the garden at Pentlands seem a
more subdued and ordered place. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that he
went through life ticketing and pigeonholing everything that came his
way: manners, emotions, thoughts, everything. It was a habit that was
growing on him in middle-age.
Dinner was usually late because Anson liked to take advantage of the
long summer twilights, and after dinner it was the habit of all the
family, save Jack, who went to bed immediately afterward, to sit in the
Victorian drawing-room, reading and writing letters or sometimes playing
patience, with Anson in his corner at Mr. Lowell’s desk working over
“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and keeping up a
prodigious correspondence with librarians and old men and women of a
genealogical bent. The routine of the evening rarely changed, for Anson
disliked going out and Olivia preferred not to go alone. It was only
with the beginning of the summer, when Sybil was grown and had begun to
go out occasionally to dinners and balls, and the disturbing Sabine,
with her passion for playing bridge, had come into the neighborhood,
that the routine was beginning to break up. There were fewer evenings
now with Olivia and Sybil playing patience and old John Pentland sitting
by the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or simply staring silently
before him, lost in thought.
There were times in those long evenings when Olivia, looking up suddenly
and for no reason at all, would discover that Sybil was sitting in the
same fashion watching her, and both of them would know that they, like
old John Pentland, had been sitting there all the while holding books in
their hands without knowing a word of what they had read. It was as if a
kind of enchantment descended upon them, as if they were waiting for
something. Once or twice the silence had been broken sharply by the
unbearable sound of groans coming from the north wing when _she_ had
been seized suddenly by one of her fits of violence.
Anson’s occasional comment and Olivia’s visits to Jack’s room to see
that nothing had happened to him were the only interruptions. They spoke
always in low voices when they played double patience in order not to
disturb Anson at his work. Sometimes he encountered a bit of information
for which he had been searching for a long time and then he would turn
and tell them of it.
There was the night when he made his discovery about Savina
Pentland....
“I was right about Savina Pentland,” he said. “She _was_ a first cousin
and not a second cousin of Toby Cane.”
Olivia displayed an interest by saying, “Was that what you wrote to the
_Transcript_ about?”
“Yes ... and I was sure that the genealogical editor was wrong. See ...
here it is in one of Jared Pentland’s letters at the time she was
drowned.... Jared was her husband.... He refers to Toby Cane as her only
male first cousin.”
“That will help you a great deal,” said Olivia, “won’t it?”
“It will help clear up the chapter about the origins of her family.” And
then, after a little pause, “I wish that I could get some trace of the
correspondence between Savina Pentland and Cane. I’m sure it would be
full of things ... but it seems not to exist ... only one or two letters
which tell nothing.”
And then he relapsed again into a complete and passionate silence, lost
in the rustle of old books and yellowed letters, leaving the legend of
Savina Pentland to take possession of the others in the room.
The memory of this woman had a way of stealing in upon the family
unaware, quite without their willing it. She was always there in the
house, more lively than any of the more sober ancestors, perhaps because
of them all she alone had been touched by splendor; she alone had been
in her reckless way a great lady. There was a power in her recklessness
and extravagance which came, in the end, to obscure all those other
plain, solemn-faced, thrifty wives whose portraits adorned the hall of
Pentlands, much as a rising sun extinguishes the feeble light of the
stars. And about her obscure origin there clung a perpetual aura of
romance, since there was no one to know just who her mother was or
exactly whence she came. The mother was born perhaps of stock no humbler
than the first shopkeeping Pentland to land on the Cape, but there was
in her the dark taint of Portuguese blood; some said that she was the
daughter of a fisherman. And Savina herself had possessed enough of
fascination to lure a cautious Pentland into eloping with her against
the scruples that were a very fiber of the Pentland bones and flesh.
The portrait of Savina Pentland stood forth among the others in the
white hall, fascinating and beautiful not only because the subject was a
dark, handsome woman, but because it had been done by Ingres in Rome
during the years when he made portraits of tourists to save himself from
starvation. It was the likeness of a small but voluptuous woman with
great wanton dark eyes and smooth black hair pulled back from a
camellia-white brow and done in a little knot on the nape of the white
neck--a woman who looked out of the old picture with the flashing,
spirited glance of one who lived boldly and passionately. She wore a
gown of peach-colored velvet ornamented with the famous parure of pearls
and emeralds given her, to the scandal of a thrifty family, by the
infatuated Jared Pentland. Passing the long gallery of portraits in the
hallway it was always Savina Pentland whom one noticed. She reigned
there as she must have reigned in life, so bold and splendorous as to
seem a bit vulgar, especially in a world of such sober folk, yet so
beautiful and so spirited that she made all the others seem scarcely
worth consideration.
Even in death she had remained an “outsider,” for she was the only one
of the family who did not rest quietly among the stunted trees at the
top of the bald hill where the first Pentlands had laid their dead. All
that was left of the warm, soft body lay in the white sand at the bottom
of the ocean within sight of Pentlands. It was as if fate had delivered
her in death into a grave as tempestuous and violent as she had been in
life. And somewhere near her in the restless white sand lay Toby Cane,
with whom she had gone sailing one bright summer day when a sudden
squall turned a gay excursion into a tragedy.
Even Aunt Cassie, who distrusted any woman with gaze so bold and free as
that set down by the brush of Ingres--even Aunt Cassie could not
annihilate the glamour of Savina’s legend. For her there was, too,
another, more painful, memory hidden in the knowledge that the parure of
pearls and emeralds and all the other jewels which Savina Pentland had
wrung from her thrifty husband, lay buried somewhere in the white sand
between her bones and those of her cousin. To Aunt Cassie Savina
Pentland seemed more than merely a reckless, extravagant creature. She
was an enemy of the Pentland fortune and of all the virtues of the
family.
The family portraits were of great value to Anson in compiling his book,
for they represented the most complete collection of ancestors existing
in all America. From the portrait of the emigrating Pentland, painted in
a wooden manner by some traveling painter of tavern signs, to the rather
handsome one of John Pentland, painted at middle-age in a pink coat by
Sargent, and the rather bad and liverish one of Anson, also by Mr.
Sargent, the collection was complete save for two--the weak Jared
Pentland who had married Savina, and the Pentland between old John’s
father and the clipper-ship owner, who had died at twenty-three, a
disgraceful thing for any Pentland to have done.
The pictures hung in a neat double row in the lofty hall, arranged
chronologically and without respect for lighting, so that the good ones
like those by Ingres and Sargent’s picture of old John Pentland and the
unfinished Gilbert Stuart of Ashur Pentland hung in obscure shadows, and
the bad ones like the tavern-sign portrait of the first Pentland were
exposed in a glare of brilliant light.
This father of all the family had been painted at the great age of
eighty-nine and looked out from his wooden background, a grim,
hard-mouthed old fellow with white hair and shrewd eyes set very close
together. It was a face such as one might find to-day among the Plymouth
Brethren of some remote, half-forgotten Sussex village, the face of a
man notable only for the toughness of his body and the rigidity of a
mind which dissented from everything. At the age of eighty-four, he had
been cast out for dissension from the church which he had come to regard
as his own property.
Next to him hung the portrait of a Pentland who had been a mediocrity
and left not even a shadowy legend; and then appeared the insolent,
disagreeable face of the Pentland who had ducked eccentric old women for
witches and cut off the ears of peace-loving Quakers in the colony
founded in “freedom to worship God.”
The third Pentland had been the greatest evangelist of his time, a man
who went through New England holding high the torch, exhorting rude
village audiences by the coarsest of language to such a pitch of
excitement that old women died of apoplexy and young women gave birth to
premature children. The sermons which still existed showed him to be a
man uncultivated and at times almost illiterate, yet his vast energy had
founded a university and his fame as an exhorter and “the flaming sword
of the Lord” had traveled to the ignorant and simple-minded brethren of
the English back country.
The next Pentland was the eldest of the exhorter’s twenty children (by
four wives), a man who clearly had departed from his father’s counsels
and appeared in his portrait a sensual, fleshly specimen, very fat and
almost good-natured, with thick red lips. It was this Pentland who had
founded the fortune which gave the family its first step upward in the
direction of the gentility which had ended with the figure of Anson
bending over “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He
had made a large fortune by equipping privateers and practising a
near-piracy on British merchantmen; and there was, too, a dark rumor
(which Anson intended to overlook) that he had made as much as three
hundred per cent profit on a single shipload of negroes in the African
slave trade.
After him there were portraits of two Pentlands who had taken part in
the Revolution and then another hiatus of mediocrity, including the gap
represented by the missing Jared; and then appeared the Anthony Pentland
who increased the fortune enormously in the clipper trade. It was the
portrait of a swarthy, powerful man (the first of the dark Pentlands,
who could all be traced directly to Savina’s Portuguese blood), painted
by a second-rate artist devoted to realism, who had depicted skilfully
the warts which marred the distinguished old gentleman. In the picture
he stood in the garden before the Pentland house at Durham with marshes
in the background and his prize clipper _Semiramis_ riding, with all
sail up, the distant ocean.
Next to him appeared the portrait of old John Pentland’s father--a man
of pious expression, dressed all in black, with a high black stock and a
wave of luxuriant black hair, the one who had raised the family to
really great wealth by contracts for shoes and blankets for the soldiers
at Gettysburg and Bull Run and Richmond. After him, gentility had
conquered completely, and the Sargent portrait of old John Pentland at
middle-age showed a man who was master of hounds and led the life of a
country gentleman, a man clearly of power and character, whose strength
of feature had turned slowly into the bitter hardness of the old man who
sat now in the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or staring before
him into space while his son set down the long history of the family.
The gallery was fascinating to strangers, as the visual record of a
family which had never lost any money (save for the extravagance of
Savina Pentland’s jewels), a family which had been the backbone of a
community, a family in which the men married wives for thrift and
housewifely virtues rather than for beauty, a family solid and
respectable and full of honor. It was a tribe magnificent in its virtue
and its strength, even at times in its intolerance and hypocrisy. It
stood represented now by old John Pentland and Anson, and the boy who
lay abovestairs in the room next Olivia’s, dying slowly.
* * * * *
At ten o’clock each night John Pentland bade them good-night and went
off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and
placing his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia, “I
wouldn’t sit up too late, if I were you, when you are so tired,” left
them and disappeared. Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and
climbed the stairs past all the ancestors.
It was only then, after they had all left her, that a kind of peace
settled over Olivia. The burdens lifted, and the cares, the worries, the
thoughts that were always troubling her, faded into the distance and for
a time she sat leaning back in the winged armchair with her eyes closed,
listening to the sounds of the night--the faint murmur of the breeze in
the faded lilacs outside the window, the creaking that afflicts very old
houses in the night, and sometimes the ominous sound of Miss Egan’s step
traversing distantly the old north wing. And then one night she heard
again the distant sound of Higgins’ voice swearing at the red mare as he
made his round of the stables before going to bed.
And after they had all gone she opened her book and fell to reading,
“_Madame de Clèves ne répondit rien, et elle pensoit avec honte qu’elle
auroit pris tout ce que l’on disoit du changement de ce prince pour des
marques de sa passion, si elle n’avoit point été détrompée. Elle se
sentoit quelque aigreur contre Madame la Dauphine...._” This was a
world in which she felt somehow strangely at peace, as if she had once
lived in it and returned in the silence of the night.
At midnight she closed the book, and making a round of the lower rooms,
put out the lights and went up to the long stairway to listen at the
doorway of her son’s room for the weak, uncertain sound of his
breathing.
2
Olivia was right in her belief that Anson was ashamed of his behavior on
the night of the ball. It was not that he made an apology or even
mentioned the affair. He simply never spoke of it again. For weeks after
the scene he did not mention the name of O’Hara, perhaps because the
name brought up inevitably the memory of his sudden, insulting speech;
but his sense of shame prevented him from harassing her on the subject.
What he never knew was that Olivia, while hating him for the insult
aimed at her father, was also pleased in a perverse, feminine way
because he had displayed for a moment a sudden fit of genuine anger. For
a moment he had come very near to being a husband who might interest his
wife.
But in the end he only sank back again into a sea of indifference so
profound that even Aunt Cassie’s campaign of insinuations and veiled
proposals could not stir him into action. The old woman managed to see
him alone once or twice, saying to him, “Anson, your father is growing
old and can’t manage everything much longer. You must begin to take a
stand yourself. The family can’t rest on the shoulders of a woman.
Besides, Olivia is an outsider, really. She’s never understood our
world.” And then, shaking her head sadly, she would murmur, “There’ll be
trouble, Anson, when your father dies, if you don’t show some backbone.
You’ll have trouble with Sybil, she’s very queer and pig-headed in her
quiet way, just as Olivia was in the matter of sending her to school in
Paris.”
And after a pause, “I am the last person in the world to interfere; it’s
only for your own good and Olivia’s and all the family’s.”
And Anson, to be rid of her, would make promises, facing her with
averted eyes in some corner of the garden or the old house where she had
skilfully run him to earth beyond the possibility of escape. And he
would leave her, troubled and disturbed because the world and this
family which had been saddled unwillingly upon him, would permit him no
peace to go on with his writing. He really hated Aunt Cassie because she
had never given him any peace, never since the days when she had kept
him in the velvet trousers and Fauntleroy curls which spurred the jeers
of the plain, red-haired little Sabine. She had never ceased to reproach
him for “not being a man and standing up for his rights.” It seemed to
him that Aunt Cassie was always hovering near, like a dark persistent
fury, always harassing him; and yet he knew, more by instinct than by
any process of reasoning, that she was his ally against the others, even
his own wife and father and children. He and Aunt Cassie prayed to the
same gods.
So he did nothing, and Olivia, keeping her word, spoke of O’Hara to
Sybil one day as they sat alone at breakfast.
The girl had been riding with him that very morning and she sat in her
riding-clothes, her face flushed by the early morning exercise, telling
her mother of the beauties of the country back of Durham, of the new
beagle puppies, and of the death of “Hardhead” Smith, who was the last
farmer of old New England blood in the county. His half-witted son, she
said, was being taken away to an asylum. O’Hara, she said, was buying
his little stony patch of ground.
When she had finished, her mother said, “And O’Hara? You like him, don’t
you?”
Sybil had a way of looking piercingly at a person, as if her violet eyes
tried to bore quite through all pretense and unveil the truth. She had a
power of honesty and simplicity that was completely disarming, and she
used it now, smiling at her mother, candidly.
“Yes, I like him very much.... But ... but....” She laughed softly. “Are
you worrying about my marrying him, my falling in love--because you
needn’t. I am fond of him because he’s the one person around here who
likes the things I like. He loves riding in the early morning when the
dew is still on the grass and he likes racing with me across the lower
meadow by the gravel-pit, and well--he’s an interesting man. When he
talks, he makes sense. But don’t worry; I shan’t marry him.”
“I _was_ interested,” said Olivia, “because you do see him more than any
one about here.”
Again Sybil laughed. “But he’s old, Mama. He’s more than thirty-five.
He’s middle-aged. I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know
exactly. He’s going to be my own age.”
“One can’t always tell. It’s not so easy as that.”
“I’m sure I can tell.” Her face took on an expression of gravity. “I’ve
devoted a good deal of thought to it and I’ve watched a great many
others.”
Olivia wanted to smile, but she knew she dared not if she were to keep
her hold upon confidences so charming and naïve.
“And I’m sure that I’ll know the man when I see him, right away, at
once. It’ll be like a spark, like my friendship with O’Hara, only deeper
than that.”
“Did you ever talk to Thérèse about love?” asked Olivia.
“No; you can’t talk to her about such things. She wouldn’t understand.
With Thérèse everything is scientific, biological. When Thérèse marries,
I think it will be some man she has picked out as the proper father,
scientifically, for her children.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“She might just have children by him without marrying him, the way she
breeds frogs. I think that’s horrible.”
Again Olivia was seized with an irresistible impulse to laugh, and
controlled herself heroically. She kept thinking of how silly, how
ignorant, she had been at Sybil’s age, silly and ignorant despite the
unclean sort of sophistication she had picked up in the corridors of
Continental hotels. She kept thinking how much better a chance Sybil had
for happiness.... Sybil, sitting there gravely, defending her warm ideas
of romance against the scientific onslaughts of the swarthy, passionate
Thérèse.
“It will be some one like O’Hara,” continued Sybil. “Some one who is
very much alive--only not middle-aged like O’Hara.”
(So Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged, and he was four years
younger than Olivia, who felt and looked so young. The girl kept talking
of O’Hara as if his life were over; but that perhaps was only because
she herself was so young.)
Olivia sighed now, despite herself. “You mustn’t expect too much from
the world, Sybil. Nothing is perfect, not even marriage. One always has
to make compromises.”
“Oh, I know that; I’ve thought a great deal about it. All the same, I’m
sure I’ll know the man when I see him.” She leaned forward and said
earnestly, “Couldn’t you tell when you were a girl?”
“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “I could tell.”
And then, inevitably, Sybil asked what Olivia kept praying she would
not ask. She could hear the girl asking it before the words were spoken.
She knew exactly what she would say.
“Didn’t you know at once when you met Father?”
And in spite of every effort, the faint echo of a sigh escaped Olivia.
“Yes, I knew.”
She saw Sybil give her one of those quick, piercing looks of inquiry and
then bow her head abruptly, as if pretending to study the pattern on her
plate.
When she spoke again, she changed the subject abruptly, so that Olivia
knew she suspected the truth, a thing which she had guarded with a
fierce secrecy for so long.
“Why don’t you take up riding again, Mother?” she asked. “I’d love to
have you go with me. We would go with O’Hara in the mornings, and then
Aunt Cassie couldn’t have anything to say about my getting involved with
him.” She looked up. “You’d like him. You couldn’t help it.”
She saw that Sybil was trying to help her in some way, to divert her and
drive away the unhappiness.
“I like him already,” said Olivia, “very much.”
Then she rose, saying, “I promised Sabine to motor into Boston with her
to-day. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
She went quickly away because she knew it was perilous to sit there any
longer talking of such things while Sybil watched her, eager with the
freshness of youth which has all life before it.
Out of all their talk two things remained distinct in her mind: one that
Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged--almost an old man, for whom
there was no longer any chance of romance; the other the immense
possibility for tragedy that lay before a girl who was so certain that
love would be a glorious romantic affair, so certain of the ideal man
whom she would find one day. What was she to do with Sybil? Where was
she to find that man? And when she found him, what difficulties would
she have to face with John Pentland and Anson and Aunt Cassie and the
host of cousins and connections who would be marshaled to defeat her?
For she saw clearly enough that this youth for whom Sybil was waiting
would never be their idea of a proper match. It would be a man with
qualities which O’Hara possessed, and even Higgins, the groom. She saw
perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders; she had come
to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a
curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked,
and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor
tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty
affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat.
They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings. O’Hara,
with his career and his energy, and Higgins, with his rabbitlike
love-affairs and his nearness to all that was earthy, still carried
about them a sense of the great zest in life. They reached down somehow
into the roots of things where there was still savor and fertility.
And as she walked along the hallway, she found herself laughing aloud
over the titles of the only three books which the Pentland family had
ever produced--“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony”
and Mr. Struthers’ two books, “Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks
and Talks in New England Churchyards.” She thought suddenly of what
Sabine had once said acidly of New England--that it was a place where
thoughts were likely to grow “higher and fewer.”
But she was frightened, too, because in the life of enchantment which
surrounded her, the virtues of O’Hara and Higgins seemed to her the only
things in the world worth possessing. She wanted desperately to be
alive, as she had never been, and she knew that this, too, was what
Sybil sought in all her groping, half-blind romantic youth. It was
something which the girl sensed and had never clearly understood,
something which she knew existed and was awaiting her.
3
Sabine, watching O’Hara as he crossed the fields through the twilight,
had penetrated in a sudden flash of intuition the depths of his
character. His profound loneliness was, perhaps, the key which unlocked
the whole of his soul, a key which Sabine knew well enough, for there
had never been a time in all her existence, save for a sudden passionate
moment or two in the course of her life with Callendar, when she was
free of a painful feeling that she was alone. Even with her own
daughter, the odd Thérèse, she was lonely. Watching life with the same
passionate intensity with which she had watched the distant figure of
O’Hara moving away against the horizon, she had come long ago to
understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of
all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity.
Looking about her she saw that old John Pentland was lonely, and Olivia,
and even her own daughter Thérèse, rambling off independently across the
marshes in search of bugs and queer plants. She saw that Anson Pentland
was never lonely, for he had his friends who were so like him as to be
very nearly indistinguishable, and he had all the traditions and
fetishes which he shared with Aunt Cassie. They were part of a fabric, a
small corner in the whole tapestry of life, from which they were
inseparable.
Of them all, it seemed to her, as she came to see more and more of
O’Hara, that he was the most lonely. He had friends, scores, even
hundreds of them, in a dozen circles, ranging from the docks where he
had spent his boyhood to the world about Durham where there were others
who treated him less coldly than the Pentland family had done. He had
friends because there was a quality about him which was irresistible. It
lurked somewhere in the depths of the humorous blue eyes and at the
corners of the full, rather sensual mouth--a kind of universal sympathy
which made him understand the fears, the hopes, the ambitions, the
weaknesses of other people. It was that quality, so invaluable in
politics, which led enemies unjustly to call him all things to all
people. He must have had the gift of friendship, for there were whole
sections of Boston which would have followed him anywhere; and yet
behind these easy, warm ties there was always a sort of veil shutting
him away from them. He had a way of being at home in a barroom or at a
hunt breakfast with equal ease, but there was a part of him--the part
which was really O’Hara--which the world never saw at all, a strangely
warm, romantic, impractical, passionate, headlong, rather unscrupulous
Irishman, who lay shut away where none could penetrate. Sabine knew this
O’Hara; he had been revealed to her swiftly in a sudden flash at the
mention of Olivia Pentland. And afterward when she thought of it, she
(Sabine Callendar), who was so hard, so bitter, so unbelieving,
surrendered to him as so many had done before her.
Standing there in her sitting-room, so big and powerful and
self-reliant, he had seemed suddenly like a little boy, like the little
boy whom she had found once late at night long ago, sitting alone and
quite still on the curb in front of her house in the Rue de Tilsitt. She
had stopped for a moment and watched him, and presently she had
approached and asked, “What are you doing here on the curb at this hour
of the night?” And the little boy, looking up, had said gravely, “I’m
playing.”
It had happened years ago--the little boy must have grown into a young
man by now--but she remembered him suddenly during the moment when
O’Hara had turned and said to her, “It will mean a great deal to me,
more than you can imagine.”
O’Hara was like that, she knew--sad and a little lonely, as if in the
midst of all his success, with his career and his big new house and his
dogs and horses and all the other shiny accoutrements of a gentleman, he
had looked up at her and said gravely, “I’m playing.”
Long ago Sabine had come to understand that one got a savor out of life
by casting overboard all the little rules which clutter up existence,
all the ties, and beliefs and traditions in which she had been given a
training so intense and severe that in the end she had turned a rebel.
Behind all the indifference of countenance and the intricacy of brain,
there lay a foundation of immense candor which had driven her to seek
her companions, with the directness of an arrow, only among the persons
whom she had come to designate as “complete.” It was a label which she
did not trouble to define to any one, doubting perhaps that any one save
herself would find any interest in it; even for herself, it was a label
lacking in definiteness. Vaguely she meant by “complete” the persons who
stood on their own, who had an existence sufficiently strong to survive
the assault or the collapse of any environment, persons who might exist
independent of any concrete world, who possessed a proud sense of
individuality, who might take root and work out a successful destiny
wherever fate chanced to drop them. They were rare, she had come to
discover, and yet they existed everywhere, such persons as John Pentland
and O’Hara, Olivia and Higgins.
So she had come to seek her life among them, drawing them quietly about
her wherever in the world she happened to pause for a time. She did it
quietly and without loud cries of “Freedom” and “Free Love” and “The
Right to Lead One’s Life,” for she was enough civilized to understand
the absurdity of making a spectacle in the market-place, and she was too
intense an individualist ever to turn missionary. Here perhaps lay her
quiet strength and the source of that vague distrust and uneasiness
which her presence created in people like Anson and Aunt Cassie. It was
unbearable for Aunt Cassie to suspect that Sabine really did not trouble
even to scorn her, unbearable to an old woman who had spent all her life
in arranging the lives of others to find that a chit of a woman like
Sabine could discover in her only a subject of mingled mirth and pity.
It was unbearable not to have the power of jolting Sabine out of her
serene and insolent indifference, unbearable to know that she was always
watching you out of those green eyes, turning you over and over as if
you were a bug and finding you in the end an inferior sort of insect.
Those who had shared the discovery of her secret were fond of her, and
those who had not were bitter against her. And it was, after all, a very
simple secret, that one has only to be simple and friendly and human and
“complete.” She had no patience with sentimentality, and affectation and
false piety.
And so the presence of Sabine began slowly to create a vaguely defined
rift in a world hitherto set and complacent and even proud of itself.
Something in the sight of her cold green eyes, in the sound of her
metallic voice, in the sudden shrewd, disillusioning observations which
she had a way of making at disconcerting moments, filled people like
Aunt Cassie with uneasiness and people like Olivia with a smoldering
sense of restlessness and rebellion. Olivia herself became more and more
conscious of the difference with the passing of each day into the next
and there were times when she suspected that that fierce old man, her
father-in-law, was aware of it. It was potent because Sabine was no
outsider; the mockery of an outsider would have slipped off the back of
the Durham world like arrows off the back of an armadillo. But Sabine
was one of them: it was that which made the difference: she was always
inside the shell.
4
One hot, breathless night in June Sabine overcame her sense of bored
indolence enough to give a dinner at Brook Cottage--a dinner well
served, with delicious food, which it might have been said she flung at
her guests with a superb air of indifference from the seat at the head
of the table, where she sat painted, ugly and magnificently dressed,
watching them all in a perverse sort of pleasure. It was a failure as an
entertainment, for it had been years since Sabine had given a dinner
where the guests were not clever enough to entertain themselves, and now
that she was back again in a world where people were invited for every
sort of reason save that you really wanted their company, she declined
to make any effort. It was a failure, too, because Thérèse, for whom it
was given, behaved exactly as she had behaved on the night of the ball.
There was an uneasiness and a strain, a sense of awkwardness among the
callow young men and a sense of weariness in Sabine and Olivia. O’Hara
was there, for Sabine had kept her half-promise; but even he sat
quietly, all his boldness and dash vanished before a boyish shyness. The
whole affair seemed to be drowned in the lassitude, the enchantment that
enveloped the old house on the other bank of the river.
Olivia had come, almost against her will, reduced to a state of
exhaustion after a long call from Aunt Cassie on the subject of the
rumored affair between Sybil and their Irish neighbor. And when they
rose, she slipped quietly away into the garden, because she could not
bear the thought of making strained and artificial conversation. She
wanted, horribly, to be left in peace.
It was a superb night--hot, as a summer night should be--but clear, too,
so that the whole sky was like a sapphire dome studded with diamonds. At
the front of the cottage, beyond the borders of the little terraced
garden, the marshes spread their dark carpet toward the distant dunes,
which with the descent of darkness had turned dim and blue against the
purer white of the line made by the foaming surf. The feel of the damp
thick grass against the sole of her silver slippers led her to stop for
a moment, breathing deeply, and filled her with a mild, half-mystical
desire to blend herself into all the beauty that surrounded her, into
the hot richness of the air, the scents of the opening blossoms and of
pushing green stems, into the grass and the sea and the rich-smelling
marshes, to slip away into a state which was nothing and yet everything,
to float into eternity. She had abruptly an odd, confused sense of the
timelessness of all these forces and sensations, of the sea and the
marshes, the pushing green Stems and the sapphire dome powdered with
diamonds above her head. She saw for the first time in all her existence
the power of something which went on and on, ignoring pitiful small
creatures like herself and all those others in the cottage behind her, a
power which ignored cities and armies and nations, which would go on and
on long after the grass had blanketed the ruins of the old house at
Pentland. It was sweeping past her, leaving her stranded somewhere in
the dull backwaters. She wanted suddenly, fiercely, to take part in all
the great spectacle of eternal fertility, a mystery which was stronger
than any of them or all of them together, a force which in the end would
crush all their transient little prides and beliefs and traditions.
And then she thought, as if she were conscious of it for the first time,
“I am tired, tired to death, and a little mad.”
Moving across the damp grass she seated herself on a stone bench which
O’Hara had placed beneath one of the ancient apple-trees left standing
from the orchard which had covered all the land about Brook Cottage in
the days when Savina Pentland was still alive; and for a long time (she
never knew how long) she remained there lost in one of those strange
lapses of consciousness when one is neither awake nor asleep but in the
vague borderland where there is no thought, no care, no troubles. And
then slowly she became aware of some one standing there quite near her,
beneath the ancient, gnarled tree. As if the presence were materialized
somehow out of a dream, she noticed first the faint, insinuating
masculine odor of cigar-smoke blending itself with the scent of the
growing flowers in Sabine’s garden, and then turning she saw a black
figure which she recognized at once as that of O’Hara. There was no
surprise in the sight of him; it seemed in a queer way as if she had
been expecting him.
As she turned, he moved toward her and spoke. “Our garden has
flourished, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You’d never think it was only a year
old.”
“Yes,” she said. “It has flourished marvelously.” And then, after a
little pause, “How long have you been standing there?”
“Only a moment. I saw you come out of the house.” They listened for a
time to the distant melancholy pounding of the surf, and presently he
said softly, with a kind of awe in his voice: “It is a marvelous night
... a night full of splendor.”
She made an effort to answer him, but somehow she could think of nothing
to say. The remark, uttered so quietly, astonished her, because she had
never thought of O’Hara as one who would be sensitive to the beauty of a
night. It was too dark to distinguish his face, but she kept seeing him
as she remembered him, seeing him, too, as the others thought of
him--rough and vigorous but a little common, with the scar on his
temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so
unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might
as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: “It is a night
full of splendor.” The men she knew--Anson’s friends--never said such
things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if
they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done
anything so unusual.
“The party is not a great success,” he was saying.
“No.”
“No one seems to be getting on with any one else. Mrs. Callendar ought
not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that.”
Olivia laughed softly. “She may have done it on purpose. You can never
tell why she does anything.”
For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he
said, “You aren’t cold out here?”
“No, not on a night like this.”
There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the
need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were
two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the
garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.
“I keep wondering,” she said, “how long it will be until the bungalows
of Durham creep down and cover all this land.”
“They won’t, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea.”
In the darkness she smiled at the thought of an Irish Roman Catholic
politician as the protector of this old New England countryside, and
aloud she said, “You’re growing to be like all the others. You want to
make the world stand still.”
“Yes, I can see that it must seem funny to you.” There was no
bitterness in his voice, but only a sort of hurt, which again astonished
her, because it was impassible to think of O’Hara as one who could be
hurt.
“There will always be the Pentland house, but, of course, all of us will
die some day and then what?”
“There will always be our children.”
She was aware slowly of slipping back into that world of cares and
troubles behind her from which she had escaped a little while before.
She said, “_You_ are looking a long way into the future.”
“Perhaps, but I mean to have children one day. And at Pentlands there is
always Sybil, who will fight for it fiercely. She’ll never give it up.”
“But it’s Jack who will own it, and I’m not so sure about him.”
Unconsciously she sighed, knowing now that she was pretending again,
being dishonest. She was pretending again that Jack would live to have
Pentlands for his own, that he would one day have children who would
carry it on. She kept saying to herself, “It is only the truth that can
save us all.” And she knew that O’Hara understood her feeble game of
pretending. She knew because he stood there silently, as if Jack were
already dead, as if he understood the reason for the faint bitter sigh
and respected it.
“You see a great deal of Sybil, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, she is a good girl. One can depend on her.”
“Perhaps if she had a little of Thérèse or Mrs. Callendar in her, she’d
be safer from being hurt.”
He did not answer her at once, but she knew that in the darkness he was
standing there, watching her.
“But that was a silly thing to say,” she murmured. “I don’t suppose you
know what I mean.”
He answered her quickly. “I do know exactly. I know and I’m sure Mrs.
Callendar knows. We’ve both learned to save ourselves--not in the same
school, but the same lesson, nevertheless. But as to Sybil, I think that
depends upon whom she marries.”
(“So now,” thought Olivia, “it is coming. It is Sybil whom he loves. He
wants to marry her. That is why he has followed me out here.”) She was
back again now, solidly enmeshed in all the intricacies of living. She
had a sudden, shameful, twinge of jealousy for Sybil, who was so young,
who had pushed her so completely into the past along with all the others
at Pentlands.
“I was wondering,” she said, “whether she was not seeing too much of
you, whether she might not be a bother.”
“No, she’ll never be that.” And then in a voice which carried a faint
echo of humor, he added, “I know that in a moment you are going to ask
my intentions.”
“No,” she said, “no”; but she could think of nothing else to say. She
felt suddenly shy and awkward and a little idiotic, like a young girl at
her first dance.
“I shall tell you what my intentions are,” he was saying, and then he
broke off suddenly. “Why is it so impossible to be honest in this world,
when we live such a little while? It would be such a different place if
we were all honest wouldn’t it?”
He hesitated, waiting for her to answer, and she said, “Yes,” almost
mechanically, “very different.”
When he replied there was a faint note of excitement in his voice. It
was pitched a little lower and he spoke more quickly. In the darkness
she could not see him, and yet she was sharply conscious of the change.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he was saying, “I’ve been seeing a great deal of
Sybil in the hope that I should see a little of her mother.”
She did not answer him. She simply sat there, speechless, overcome by
confusion, as if she had been a young girl with her first lover. She
was even made a little dizzy by the sound of his voice.
“I have offended you. I’m sorry. I only spoke the truth. There is no
harm in that.”
With a heroic effort to speak intelligently, she succeeded in saying,
“No, I am not offended.” (It all seemed such a silly, helpless, pleasant
feeling.) “No, I’m not offended. I don’t know....”
Of only one thing was she certain; that this strange, dizzy, intoxicated
state was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was sinister and
overwhelming in a bitter-sweet fashion. She kept thinking, “I can begin
to understand how a young girl can be seduced, how she cannot know what
she is doing.”
“I suppose,” he was saying, “that you think me presumptuous.”
“No, I only think everything is impossible, insane.”
“You think me a kind of ruffian, a bum, an Irishman, a Roman Catholic,
some one you have never heard of.” He waited, and then added: “I _am_
all that, from one point of view.”
“No, I don’t think that; I don’t think that.”
He sat down beside her quietly on the stone bench. “You have every right
to think it,” he continued softly. “Every right in the world, and still
things like that make no difference, nothing makes any difference.”
“My father,” she said softly, “was a man very like you. His enemies
sometimes used to call him ‘shanty Irish.’...”
She knew all the while that she should have risen and sought indignant
refuge in the house. She knew that perhaps she was being absurd, and yet
she stayed there quietly. She was so tired and she had waited for so
long (she only knew it now in a sudden flash) to have some one talk to
her in just this way, as if she were a woman. She needed some one to
lean upon, so desperately.
“How can you know me?” she asked out of a vague sense of helplessness.
“How can you know anything about me?”
He did not touch her. He only sat there in the darkness, making her feel
by a sort of power which was too strong for her, that all he said was
terribly the truth.
“I know, I know, all about you, everything. I’ve watched you. I’ve
understood you, even better than the others. A man whose life has been
like mine sees and understands a great deal that others never notice
because for him everything depends upon a kind of second sight. It’s the
one great weapon of the opportunist.” There was a silence and he asked,
“Can you understand that? It may be hard, because your life has been so
different.”
“Not so different, as you might think, only perhaps I’ve made more of a
mess of it.” And straightening her body, she murmured, “It is foolish of
me to let you talk this way.”
He interrupted her with a quick burst of almost boyish eagerness. “But
you’re glad, aren’t you? You’re glad, all the same, whether you care
anything for me or not. You’ve deserved it for a long time.”
She began to cry softly, helplessly, without a sound, the tears running
down her cheeks, and she thought, “Now I’m being a supreme fool. I’m
pitying myself.” But she could not stop.
It appeared that even in the darkness he was aware of her tears, for he
chose not to interrupt them. They sat thus for a long time in silence,
Olivia conscious with a terrible aching acuteness, of the beauty of the
night and finding it all strange and unreal and confused.
“I wanted you to know,” he said quietly, “that there was some one near
you, some one who worships you, who would give up everything for you.”
And after a time, “Perhaps we had better go in now. You can go in
through the piazza and powder your nose. I’ll go in through the door
from the garden.”
And as they walked across the damp, scented grass, he said, “It would be
pleasant if you would join Sybil and me riding in the morning.”
“But I haven’t been on a horse in years,” said Olivia.
* * * * *
Throughout the rest of the evening, while she sat playing bridge with
Sabine and O’Hara and the Mannering boy, her mind kept straying from the
game into unaccustomed by-ways. It was not, she told herself, that she
was even remotely in love with O’Hara; it was only that some one--a man
who was no creature of ordinary attractions--had confessed his
admiration for her, and so she felt young and giddy and elated. The
whole affair was silly ... and yet, yet, in a strange way, it was not
silly at all. She kept thinking of Anson’s remarks about his father and
old Mrs. Soames, “It’s a silly affair”--and of Sybil saying gravely,
“Only not middle-aged, like O’Hara,” and it occurred to her at the same
time that in all her life she felt really young for the first time. She
had been young as she sat on the stone bench under the ancient
apple-tree, young in spite of everything.
And aloud she would say, “Four spades,” and know at once that she should
have made no such bid.
She was unnerved, too, by the knowledge that there were, all the while,
two pairs of eyes far more absorbed in her than in the game of
bridge--the green ones of Sabine and the bright blue ones of O’Hara. She
could not look up without encountering the gaze of one or the other; and
to protect herself she faced them with a hard, banal little smile which
she put in place in the mechanical way used by Miss Egan. It was the
sort of smile which made her face feel very tired, and for the first
time she had a half-comic flash of pity for Miss Egan. The face of the
nurse must at times have grown horribly tired.
* * * * *
The giddiness still clung to her as she climbed into the motor beside
Sybil and they drove off down the lane which led from Brook Cottage to
Pentlands. The road was a part of a whole tracery of lanes, bordered by
hedges and old trees, which bound together the houses of the
countryside, and at night they served as a promenade and meeting-place
for the servants of the same big houses. One came upon them in little
groups of three or four, standing by gates or stone walls, gossiping and
giggling together in the darkness, exchanging tales of the life that
passed in the houses of their masters, stories of what the old man did
yesterday, and how Mrs. So-and-so only took one bath a week. There was a
whole world which lay beneath the solid, smooth, monotonous surface that
shielded the life of the wealthy, a world which in its way was full of
mockery and dark secrets and petty gossip, a world perhaps fuller of
truth because it lay hidden away where none--save perhaps Aunt Cassie,
who knew how many fascinating secrets servants had--ever looked, and
where there was small need for the sort of pretense which Olivia found
so tragic. It circulated the dark lanes at night after the dinners of
the neighborhood were finished, and sometimes the noisy echoes of its
irreverent mockery rose in wild Irish laughter that echoed back and
forth across the mist-hung meadows.
The same lanes were frequented, too, by lovers, who went in pairs
instead of groups of three or four, and at times there were echoes of a
different sort of merriment--the wild, half-hysterical laughter of some
kitchen-maid being wooed roughly and passionately in some dark corner by
a groom or a house-servant. It was a world which blossomed forth only
at nightfall. Sometimes in the darkness the masters, motoring home from
a ball or a dinner, would come upon an amorous couple, bathed in the
sudden brilliant glare of motor-lights, sitting with their arms about
each other against a tree, or lying half-hidden among a tangle of
hawthorn and elder-bushes.
To-night, as Olivia and Sybil drove in silence along the road, the hot
air was filled with the thick scent of the hawthorn-blossoms and the
rich, dark odor of cattle, blown toward them across the meadows by the
faint salt breeze from the marshes. It was late and the lights of the
motor encountered no strayed lovers until at the foot of the hill by the
old bridge the glare illuminated suddenly the figures of a man and a
woman seated together against the stone wall. At their approach the
woman slipped quickly over the wall, and the man, following, leaped
lightly as a goat to the top and into the field beyond. Sybil laughed
and murmured, “It’s Higgins again.”
It _was_ Higgins. There was no mistaking the stocky, agile figure clad
in riding-breeches and sleeveless cotton shirt, and as he leaped the
wall the sight of him aroused in Olivia a nebulous, fleeting impression
that was like a half-forgotten memory. A startled fawn, she thought,
must have scuttled off into the bushes in the same fashion. And she had
suddenly that same strange, prickly feeling of terror that had affected
Sabine on the night she discovered him hidden in the lilacs watching the
ball.
She shivered, and Sybil asked, “You’re not cold?”
“No.”
She was thinking of Higgins and hoping that this was not the beginning
of some new scrape. Once before a girl had come to her in trouble--a
Polish girl, whom she helped and sent away because she could not see
that forcing Higgins to marry her would have brought anything but
misery for both of them. It never ceased to amaze her that a man so
gnarled and ugly, such a savage, hairy little man as Higgins, should
have half the girls of the countryside running after him.
* * * * *
In her own room she listened in the darkness until she heard the sound
of Jack’s gentle breathing and then, after undressing, she sat for a
long time at the window looking out across the meadows toward the
marshes. There was a subdued excitement which seemed to run through all
her body and would not let her sleep. She no longer felt the weariness
of spirit which had let her slip during these last few months into a
kind of lethargy. She was alive, more alive than she had ever been, even
as a young girl; her cheeks were hot and flushed, so that she placed her
white hands against them to feel a coolness that was missing from the
night air; but they, too, were hot with life.
And as she sat there, the sounds from Sybil’s room across the hall died
away and at last the night grew still save for the sound of her son’s
slow breathing and the familiar ghostly creakings of the old house. She
was alone now, the only one who was not sleeping; and sitting above the
mist-hung meadows she grew more quiet. The warm rich scents of the night
drifted in at the window, and again she became aware of a kind of
voluptuousness which she had sensed in the air as she sat, hours
earlier, on Sabine’s terrace above the sea. It had assailed her again as
they drove through the lane across the low, marshy pastures by the
river. And then in the figure of Higgins, leaping the wall like a goat,
it had come with a shock to a sudden climax of feeling, with a sudden
acuteness which even terrified her. It still persisted a little, the odd
feeling of some tremendous, powerful force at work all about her,
moving swiftly and quietly, thrusting aside and annihilating those who
opposed it.
She thought again, “I am a little mad to-night. What has come over me?”
And she grew frightened, though it was a different sort of terror from
that which afflicted her at the odd moments when she felt all about her
the presence of the dead who lived on and on at Pentlands. What she knew
now was no terror of the dead; it was rather a terror of warm,
passionate life. She thought, “This is what must have happened to the
others. This is how they must have felt before they died.”
It was not physical death that she meant, but a death somehow of the
soul, a death which left behind it such withered people as Aunt Cassie
and Anson, the old woman in the north wing, and even a man so rugged and
powerful as John Pentland, who had struggled so much more fiercely than
the others. And she got a sudden sense of being caught between two dark,
struggling forces in fierce combat. It was confused and vague, yet it
made her feel suddenly ill in a physical sense. The warm feeling of life
and excitement flowed away, leaving her chilled and relaxed, weary all
at once, and filled with a soft lassitude, still looking out into the
night, still smelling the thick odor of cattle and hawthorn-blossoms.
* * * * *
She never knew whether or not she had fallen asleep in the bergère by
the window, but she did know that she was roused abruptly by the sound
of footsteps. Outside the door of her room, in the long hallway, there
was some one walking, gently, cautiously. It was not this time merely
the creaking of the old house; it was the sound of footfalls, regular,
measured, inevitable, those of some person of almost no weight at all.
She listened, and slowly, cautiously, almost as if the person were blind
and groping his way in the darkness, the step advanced until presently
it came opposite her and thin slivers of light outlined the door that
led into the hall. Quietly she rose and, still lost in a vague sense of
moving in a nightmare, she went over to the door and opened it. Far down
the long hall, at the door which opened into the stairway leading to the
attic of the house, there was a small circle of light cast by an
electric torch. It threw into a black silhouette the figure of an old
woman with white hair whom Olivia recognized at once. It was the old
woman escaped from the north wing. While she stood watching her, the
figure, fumbling at the door, opened it and disappeared quickly into the
stairway.
There was no time to be lost, not time even to go in search of the
starched Miss Egan. The poor creature might fling herself from the upper
windows. So, without stopping even to throw a dressing-gown about her,
Olivia went quickly along the dark hall and up the stairway where the
fantastic creature in the flowered wrapper had vanished.
The attic was an enormous, unfinished room that covered the whole of the
house, a vast cavern of a place, empty save for a few old trunks and
pieces of broken furniture. The flotsam and jetsam of Pentland life had
been stowed away there, lost and forgotten in the depths of the big
room, for more than a century. No one entered it. Since Sybil and Jack
had grown, it remained half-forgotten. They had played there on rainy
days as small children, and before them Sabine and Anson had played in
the same dark, mysterious corners among broken old trunks and sofas and
chairs.
Olivia found the place in darkness save for the patches of blue light
where the luminous night came in at the double row of dormer windows,
and at the far end, by a group of old trunks, the circle of light from
the torch that moved this way and that, as if old Mrs. Pentland were
searching for something. In the haste of her escape and flight, her
thin white hair had come undone and fell about her shoulders. A sickly
smell of medicine hung about her.
Olivia touched her gently and said, “What have you lost, Mrs. Pentland?
Can I help you?”
The old woman turned and, throwing the light of the torch full into
Olivia’s face, stared at her with the round blue eyes, murmuring, “Oh,
it’s you, Olivia. Then it’s all right. Perhaps you can help me.”
“What was it you lost? We might look for it in the morning.”
“I’ve forgotten what it was now. You startled me, and you know my poor
brain isn’t very good, at best. It never has been since I married.”
Sharply she looked at Olivia. “It didn’t affect you that way, did it?
You don’t ever drift away and feel yourself growing dimmer and dimmer,
do you? It’s odd. Perhaps it’s different with your husband.”
Olivia saw that the old woman was having one of those isolated moments
of clarity and reason which were more horrible than her insanity because
for a time she made you see that, after all, she was like yourself,
human and capable of thought. To Olivia these moments were almost as if
she witnessed the rising of the dead.
“No,” said Olivia. “Perhaps if we went to bed now, you’d remember in the
morning.”
Old Mrs. Pentland shook her head violently. “No, no, I must find them
now. It may be all different in the morning and I won’t know anything
and that Irish woman won’t let me out. Say over the names of a few
things like prunes, prisms, persimmons. That’s what Mr. Dickens used to
have his children do when he couldn’t think of a word.”
“Let me have the light,” said Olivia; “perhaps I can find what it is you
want.”
With the meekness of a child, the old woman gave her the electric torch
and Olivia, turning it this way and that, among the trunks and old
rubbish, made a mock search among the doll-houses and the toy dishes
left scattered in the corner of the attic where the children had played
house for the last time.
While she searched, the old woman kept up a running comment, half to
herself: “It’s something I wanted to find very much. It’ll make a great
difference here in the lives of all of us. I thought I might find Sabine
here to help me. She was here yesterday morning, playing with Anson. It
rained all day and they couldn’t go out. I hid it here yesterday when I
came up to see them.”
Olivia again attempted wheedling.
“It’s late now, Mrs. Pentland. We ought both to be in bed. You try to
remember what it is you want, and in the morning I’ll come up and find
it for you.”
For a moment the old woman considered this, and at last she said, “You
wouldn’t give it to me if you found it. I’m sure you wouldn’t. You’re
too afraid of them all.”
“I promise you I will. You can trust me, can’t you?”
“Yes, yes, you’re the only one who doesn’t treat me as if I wasn’t quite
bright. Yes, I think I can trust you.” Another thought occurred to her
abruptly. “But I wouldn’t remember again. I might forget. Besides, I
don’t think Miss Egan would let me.”
Olivia took one of the thin old hands in hers and said, as if she were
talking to a little child, “I know what we’ll do. To-morrow you write it
out on a bit of paper and then I’ll find it and bring it to you.”
“I’m sure little Sabine could find it,” said the old woman. “She’s very
good at such things. She’s such a clever child.”
“I’ll go over and fetch Sabine to have her help me.”
The old woman looked at her sharply. “You’ll promise that?” she asked.
“You’ll promise?”
“Of course, surely.”
“Because all the others are always deceiving me.”
And then quite gently she allowed herself to be led across the moonlit
patches of the dusty floor, down the stairs and back to her room. In the
hall of the north wing they came suddenly upon the starched Miss Egan,
all her starch rather melted and subdued now, her red face purple with
alarm.
“I’ve been looking for her everywhere, Mrs. Pentland,” she told Olivia.
“I don’t know how she escaped. She was asleep when I left. I went down
to the kitchen for her orange-juice, and while I was gone she
disappeared.”
It was the old woman who answered. Looking gravely at Olivia, she said,
with an air of confidence, “You know I never speak to her at all. She’s
common. She’s a common Irish servant. They can shut me up with her, but
they can’t make me speak to her.” And then she began to drift back again
into the hopeless state that was so much more familiar. She began to
mumble over and over again a chain of words and names which had no
coherence.
Olivia and Miss Egan ignored her, as if part of her--the vaguely
_rational_ old woman--had disappeared, leaving in her place this pitiful
chattering creature who was a stranger.
Olivia explained where it was she found the old woman and why she had
gone there.
“She’s been talking on the subject for days,” said Miss Egan. “I think
it’s letters that she’s looking for, but it may be nothing at all. She
mixes everything terribly.”
Olivia was shivering now in her nightdress, more from weariness and
nerves than from the chill of the night.
“I wouldn’t speak of it to any of the others, Miss Egan,” she said. “It
will only trouble them. And we must be more careful about her in the
future.”
The old woman had gone past them now, back into the dark room where she
spent her whole life, and the nurse had begun to recover a little of her
defiant confidence. She even smiled, the hard, glittering smile which
always said, “You cannot do without me, whatever happens.”
Aloud she said, “I can’t imagine what happened, Mrs. Pentland.”
“It was an accident, never mind,” said Olivia. “Good-night. Only I think
it’s better not to speak of what has happened. It will only alarm the
others.”
But she was puzzled, Olivia, because underneath the dressing-gown Miss
Egan had thrown about her shoulders she saw that the nurse was dressed
neither in night-clothes nor in her uniform, but in the suit of blue
serge that she wore on the rare occasions when she went into the city.
5
She spoke to no one of what had happened, either on the terrace or in
the lane or in the depths of the old attic, and the days came to resume
again their old monotonous round, as if the strange, hot, disturbing
night had had no more existence than a dream. She did not see O’Hara,
yet she heard of him, constantly, from Sybil, from Sabine, even from
Jack, who seemed stronger than he had ever been and able for a time to
go about the farm with his grandfather in the trap drawn by an old white
horse. There were moments when it seemed to Olivia that the boy might
one day be really well, and yet there was never any real joy in those
moments, because always in the back of her mind stood the truth. She
knew it would never be, despite all that fierce struggle which she and
the old man kept up perpetually against the thing which was stronger
than either of them. Indeed, she even found a new sort of sadness in the
sight of the pale thin boy and the rugged old man driving along the
lanes in the trap, the eyes of the grandfather bright with a look of
deluding hope. It was a look which she found unbearable because it was
the first time in years, almost since that first day when Jack, as a
tiny baby who did not cry enough, came into the world, that the
expression of the old man had changed from one of grave and
uncomplaining resignation.
Sometimes when she watched them together she was filled with a fierce
desire to go to John Pentland and tell him that it was not her fault
that there were not more children, other heirs to take the place of
Jack. She wanted to tell him that she would have had ten children if it
were possible, that even now she was still young enough to have more
children. She wanted to pour out to him something of that hunger of life
which had swept over her on the night in Sabine’s garden beneath the
apple-tree, a spot abounding in fertility. But she knew, too, how
impossible it was to discuss a matter which old John Pentland, in the
depths of his soul believed to be “indelicate.” Such things were all
hidden behind a veil which shut out so much of truth from all their
lives. There were times when she fancied he understood it all, those
times when he took her hand and kissed her affectionately. She fancied
that he understood and that the knowledge lay somehow at the root of the
old man’s quiet contempt for his own son.
But she saw well enough the tragedy that lay deep down at the root of
the whole matter. She understood that it was not Anson who was to blame.
It was that they had all been caught in the toils of something stronger
than any of them, a force which with a cruel injustice compelled her to
live a dry, monotonous, barren existence when she would have embraced
life passionately, which compelled her to watch her own son dying slowly
before her eyes.
Always she came back to the same thought, that the boy must be kept
alive until his grandfather was dead; and sometimes, standing on the
terrace, looking out across the fields, Olivia saw that old Mrs.
Soames, dressed absurdly in pink, with a large picture-hat, was riding
in the trap with the old man and his grandson, as if in reality she were
the grandmother of Jack instead of the mad old woman abovestairs.
The days came to resume their round of dull monotony, and yet there was
a difference, odd and indefinable, as if in some way the sun were
brighter than it had been, as if those days, when even in the bright
sunlight the house had seemed a dull gray place, were gone now. She
could no longer look across the meadows toward the bright new chimneys
of O’Hara’s house without a sudden quickening of breath, a warm pleasant
sensation of no longer standing quite alone.
She was not even annoyed any longer by the tiresome daily visits of Aunt
Cassie, nor by the old woman’s passion for pitying her and making wild
insinuations against Sabine and O’Hara and complaining of Sybil riding
with him in the mornings over the dew-covered fields. She was able now
simply to sit there politely as she had once done, listening while the
old woman talked on and on; only now she did not even listen with
attention. It seemed to her at times that Aunt Cassie was like some
insect beating itself frantically against a pane of glass, trying over
and over again with an unflagging futility to enter where it was
impossible to enter.
It was Sabine who gave her a sudden glimpse of penetration into this
instinct about Aunt Cassie, Sabine who spent all her time finding out
about people. It happened one morning that the two clouds of dust, the
one made by Aunt Cassie and the other by Sabine, met at the very foot of
the long drive leading up to Pentlands, and together the two women--one
dressed severely in shabby black, without so much as a fleck of powder
on her nose, the other dressed expensively in what some Paris dressmaker
chose to call a _costume de sport_, with her face made up like a
Parisian--arrived together to sit on the piazza of Pentlands insulting
each other subtly for an hour. When at last Sabine managed to outstay
Aunt Cassie (it was always a contest between them, for each knew that
the other would attack her as soon as she was out of hearing) she turned
to Olivia and said abruptly, “I’ve been thinking about Aunt Cassie, and
I’m sure now of one thing. Aunt Cassie is a virgin!”
There was something so cold-blooded and sudden in the statement that
Olivia laughed.
“I’m sure of it,” persisted Sabine with quiet seriousness. “Look at her.
She’s always talking about the tragedy of her being too frail ever to
have had children. She never tried. That’s the answer. She never tried.”
Sabine tossed away what remained of the cigarette she had lighted to
annoy Aunt Cassie, and continued. “You never knew my Uncle Ned Struthers
when he was young. You only knew him as an old man with no spirit left.
But he wasn’t that way always. It’s what she did to him. She destroyed
him. He was a full-blooded kind of man who liked drinking and horses and
he must have liked women, too, but she cured him of that. He would have
liked children, but instead of a wife he only got a woman who couldn’t
bear the thought of not being married and yet couldn’t bear what
marriage meant. He got a creature who fainted and wept and lay on a sofa
all day, who got the better of him because he was a nice, stupid,
chivalrous fellow.”
Sabine was launched now with all the passion which seized her when she
had laid bare a little patch of life and examined it minutely.
“He didn’t even dare to be unfaithful to her. If he looked at another
woman she fainted and became deathly ill and made terrible scenes. I can
remember some of them. I remember that once he called on Mrs. Soames
when she was young and beautiful, and when he came home Aunt Cassie met
him in hysterics and told him that if it ever happened again she would
go out, ‘frail and miserable as she was,’ and commit adultery. I
remember the story because I overheard my father telling it when I was a
child and I was miserable until I found out what ‘committing adultery’
meant. In the end she destroyed him. I’m sure of it.”
Sabine sat there, with a face like stone, following with her eyes the
cloud of dust that moved along the lane as Aunt Cassie progressed on her
morning round of visits, a symbol in a way of all the forces that had
warped her own existence.
“It’s possible,” murmured Olivia.
Sabine turned toward her with a quick, sudden movement. “That’s why she
is always so concerned with the lives of other people. She has never had
any life of her own, never. She’s always been afraid. It’s why she loves
the calamities of other people, because she’s never had any of her own.
Not even her husband’s death was a calamity. It left her free,
completely free of troubles as she had always wanted to be.”
And then a strange thing happened to Olivia. It was as if a new Aunt
Cassie had been born, as if the old one, so full of tears and easy
sympathy who always appeared miraculously when there was a calamity in
the neighborhood, the Aunt Cassie who was famous for her good works and
her tears and words of religious counsel, had gone down the lane for the
last time, never to return again. To-morrow morning a new Aunt Cassie
would arrive, one who outwardly would be the same; only to Olivia she
would be different, a woman stripped of all those veils of pretense and
emotions with which she wrapped herself, an old woman naked in her
ugliness who, Olivia understood in a blinding flash of clarity, was like
an insect battering itself against a pane of glass in a futile attempt
to enter where it was impossible for her ever to enter. And she was no
longer afraid of Aunt Cassie now. She did not even dislike her; she only
pitied the old woman because she had missed so much, because she would
die without ever having lived. And she must have been young and handsome
once, and very amusing. There were still moments when the old lady’s
charm and humor and sharp tongue were completely disarming.
Sabine was talking again, in a cold, unrelenting voice. “She lay there
all those years on the sofa covered with a shawl, trying to arrange the
lives of every one about her. She killed Anson’s independence and ruined
my happiness. She terrorized her husband until in the end he died to
escape her. He was a good-natured man, horrified of scenes and
scandals.” Sabine lighted a cigarette and flung away the match with a
sudden savage gesture. “And now she goes about like an angel of pity, a
very brisk angel of pity, a harpy in angel’s clothing. She has played
her rôle well. Every one believes in her as a frail, good, unhappy
woman. Some of the saints must have been very like her. Some of them
must have been trying old maids.”
She rose and, winding the chiffon scarf about her throat, opened her
yellow parasol, saying, “I know I’m right. She’s a virgin. At least,”
she added, “in the technical sense, she’s a virgin. I know nothing about
her mind.”
And then, changing abruptly, she said, “Will you go up to Boston with me
to-morrow? I’m going to do something about my hair. There’s gray
beginning to come into it.”
Olivia did not answer her at once, but when she did speak it was to say,
“Yes; I’m going to take up riding again and I want to order clothes. My
old ones would look ridiculous now. It’s been years since I was on a
horse.”
Sabine looked at her sharply and, looking away again, said, “I’ll stop
for you about ten o’clock.”
CHAPTER VI
Heat, damp and overwhelming, and thick with the scent of fresh-cut hay
and the half-fetid odor of the salt marshes, settled over Durham,
reducing all life to a state of tropical relaxation. Even in the
mornings when Sybil rode with O’Hara across the meadows, there was no
coolness and no dew on the grass. Only Aunt Cassie, thin and wiry, and
Anson, guided perpetually by a sense of duty which took no reckoning of
such things as weather, resisted the muggy warmth. Aunt Cassie, alike
indifferent to heat and cold, storm or calm, continued her indefatigable
rounds. Sabine, remarking that she had always known that New England was
the hottest place this side of Sheol, settled into a state of complete
inertia, not stirring from the house until after the sun had
disappeared. Even then her only action was to come to Pentlands to sit
in the writing-room playing bridge languidly with Olivia and John
Pentland and old Mrs. Soames.
The old lady grew daily more dazed and forgetful and irritating as a
fourth at bridge. John Pentland always insisted upon playing with her,
saying that they understood each other’s game; but he deceived no one,
save Mrs. Soames, whose wits were at best a little dim; the others knew
that it was to protect her. They saw him sit calmly and patiently while
she bid suits she could not possibly make, while she trumped his tricks
and excused herself on the ground of bad eyesight. She had been a great
beauty once and she was still, with all her paint and powder, a vain
woman. She would not wear spectacles and so played by looking through
lorgnettes, which lowered the whole tempo of the game and added to the
confusion. At times, in the midst of the old lady’s blunders, a look of
murder came into the green eyes of Sabine, but Olivia managed somehow to
prevent any outburst; she even managed to force Sabine into playing on,
night after night. The patience and tenderness of the old man towards
Mrs. Soames moved her profoundly, and she fancied that Sabine,
too,--hard, cynical, intolerant Sabine--was touched by it. There was a
curious, unsuspected soft spot in Sabine, as if in some way she
understood the bond between the two old people. Sabine, who allowed
herself to be bored by no one, presently became willing to sit there
night after night bearing this special boredom patiently.
Once when Olivia said to her, “We’ll all be old some day. Perhaps we’ll
be worse than old Mrs. Soames,” Sabine replied with a shrug of
bitterness, “Old age is a bore. That’s the trouble with us, Olivia.
We’ll never give up and become old ladies. It used to be the beauties
who clung to youth, and now all of us do it. We’ll probably be painted
old horrors ... like her.”
“Perhaps,” replied Olivia, and a kind of terror took possession of her
at the thought that she would be forty on her next birthday and that
nothing lay before her, even in the immediate future, save evenings like
these, playing bridge with old people until presently she herself was
old, always in the melancholy atmosphere of the big house at Pentlands.
“But I shan’t take to drugs,” said Sabine. “At least I shan’t do that.”
Olivia looked at her sharply. “Who takes drugs?” she asked.
“Why, she does ... old Mrs. Soames. She’s taken drugs for years. I
thought every one knew it.”
“No,” said Olivia sadly. “I never knew it.”
Sabine laughed. “You are an innocent,” she answered.
And after Sabine had gone home, the cloud of melancholy clung to her
for hours. She felt suddenly that Anson and Aunt Cassie might be right,
after all. There was something dangerous in a woman like Sabine, who
tore aside every veil, who sacrificed everything to her passion for the
truth. Somehow it riddled a world which at its best was not too
cheerful.
* * * * *
There were evenings when Mrs. Soames sent word that she was feeling too
ill to play, and on those occasions John Pentland drove over to see her,
and the bridge was played instead at Brook Cottage with O’Hara and a
fourth recruited impersonally from the countryside. To Sabine, the
choice was a matter of indifference so long as the chosen one could play
well.
It happened on these occasions that O’Hara and Olivia came to play
together, making a sort of team, which worked admirably. He played as
she knew he would play, aggressively and brilliantly, with a fierce
concentration and a determination to win. It fascinated her that a man
who had spent most of his life in circles where bridge played no part,
should have mastered the intricate game so completely. She fancied him
taking lessons with the same passionate application which he had given
to his career.
He did not speak to her again of the things he had touched upon during
that first hot night on the terrace, and she was careful never to find
herself alone with him. She was ashamed at the game she played--of
seeing him always with Sabine or riding with Sybil and giving him no
chance to speak; it seemed to her that such behavior was cheap and
dishonest. Yet she could not bring herself to refuse seeing him, partly
because to refuse would have aroused the suspicions of the already
interested Sabine, but more because she _wanted_ to see him. She found a
kind of delight in the way he looked at her, in the perfection with
which they came to understand each other’s game; and though he did not
see her alone, he kept telling her in a hundred subtle ways that he was
a man in love, who adored her.
She told herself that she was behaving like a silly schoolgirl, but she
could not bring herself to give him up altogether. It seemed to her
unbearable that she should lose these rare happy evenings. And she was
afraid, too, that Sabine would call her a fool.
* * * * *
As early summer turned into July, old Mrs. Soames came less and less
frequently to play bridge and there were times when Sabine, dining out
or retiring early, left them without any game at all and the old
familiar stillness came to settle over the drawing-room at Pentlands ...
evenings when Olivia and Sybil played double patience and Anson worked
at Mr. Lowell’s desk over the mazes of the Pentland Family history.
On one of these evenings, when Olivia’s eyes had grown weary of reading,
she closed her book and, turning toward her husband, called his name.
When he did not answer her at once she spoke to him again, and waited
until he looked up. Then she said, “Anson, I have taken up riding again.
I think it is doing me good.”
But Anson, lost somewhere in the chapter about Savina Pentland and her
friendship with Ingres, was not interested and made no answer.
“I go in the mornings,” she repeated, “before breakfast, with Sybil.”
Anson said, “Yes,” again, and then, “I think it an excellent idea--your
color is better,” and went back to his work.
So she succeeded in telling him that it was all right about Sybil and
O’Hara. She managed to tell him without actually saying it that she
would go with them and prevent any entanglement. She had told him, too,
without once alluding to the scene of which he was ashamed. And she
knew, of course, now, that there was no danger of any entanglement, at
least not one which involved Sybil.
Sitting with the book closed in her lap, she remained for a time
watching the back of her husband’s head--the thin gray hair, the cords
that stood out weakly under the desiccated skin, the too small ears set
too close against the skull; and in reality, all the while she was
seeing another head set upon a full muscular neck, the skin tanned and
glowing with the flush of health, the thick hair short and vigorous; and
she felt an odd, inexplicable desire to weep, thinking at the same time,
“I am a wicked woman. I must be really bad.” For she had never known
before what it was to be in love and she had lived for nearly twenty
years in a family where love had occupied a poor forgotten niche.
She was sitting thus when John Pentland came in at last, looking more
yellow and haggard than he had been in days. She asked him quietly, so
as not to disturb Anson, whether Mrs. Soames was really ill. “No,” said
the old man, “I don’t think so; she seems all right, a little tired,
that’s all. We’re all growing old.”
He seated himself and began to read like the others, pretending clearly
an interest which he did not feel, for Olivia caught him suddenly
staring before him in a line beyond the printed page. She saw that he
was not reading at all, and in the back of her mind a little cluster of
words kept repeating themselves--“_a little tired, that’s all, we’re all
growing old; a little tired, that’s all, we’re all growing old_”--over
and over again monotonously, as if she were hypnotizing herself. She
found herself, too, staring into space in the same enchanted fashion as
the old man. And then, all at once, she became aware of a figure
standing in the doorway beckoning to her, and, focusing her gaze, she
saw that it was Nannie, clad in a dressing-gown, her old face screwed up
in an expression of anxiety. She had some reason for not disturbing the
others, for she did not speak. Standing in the shadow, she beckoned; and
Olivia, rising quietly, went out into the hall, closing the door behind
her.
There, in the dim light, she saw that the old woman had been crying and
was shaking in fright. She said, “Something had happened to Jack,
something dreadful.”
She had known what it was before Nannie spoke. It seemed to her that she
had known all along, and now there was no sense of shock but only a
hard, dead numbness of all feeling.
“Call up Doctor Jenkins,” she said, with a kind of dreadful calm, and
turning away she went quickly up the long stairs.
* * * * *
In the darkness of her own room she did not wait now to listen for the
sound of breathing. It had come at last--the moment when she would enter
the room and, listening for the sound, encounter only the stillness of
the night. Beyond, in the room which he had occupied ever since he was a
tiny baby, there was the usual dim night-light burning in the corner,
and by its dull glow she was able to make out the narrow bed and his
figure lying there as it had always lain, asleep. He must have been
asleep, she thought, for it was impossible to have died so quietly,
without moving. But she knew, of course, that he _was_ dead, and she saw
how near to death he had always been, how it was only a matter of
slipping over, quite simply and gently.
He had escaped them at last--his grandfather and herself--in a moment
when they had not been there watching; and belowstairs in the
drawing-room John Pentland was sitting with a book in his lap by Mr.
Longfellow’s lamp, staring into space, still knowing nothing. And
Anson’s pen scratched away at the history of the Pentland Family and the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, while here in the room where she stood the
Pentland family had come to an end.
She did not weep. She knew that weeping would come later, after the
doctor had made his silly futile call to tell her what she already knew.
And now that this thing which she had fought for so long had happened,
she was aware of a profound peace. It seemed to her even, that the boy,
her own son, was happier now; for she had a fear, bordering upon
remorse, that they had kept him alive all those years against his will.
He looked quiet and still now and not at all as he had looked on those
long, terrible nights when she had sat in this same chair by the same
bed while, propped among pillows because he could not breathe lying
down, he fought for breath and life, more to please her and his
grandfather than because he wanted to live. She saw that there could be
a great beauty in death. It was not as if he had died alone. He had
simply gone to sleep.
She experienced, too, an odd and satisfying feeling of reality, of
truth, as if in some way the air all about her had become cleared and
freshened. Death was not a thing one could deny by pretense. Death was
real. It marked the end of something, definitely and clearly for all
time. There could be no deceptions about death.
She wished now that she had told Nannie not to speak to the others. She
wanted to stay there alone in the dimly lighted room until the sky
turned gray beyond the marshes.
* * * * *
They did not leave her in peace with her son. There came first of all a
knock which admitted old Nannie, still trembling and hysterical,
followed by the starched and efficient Miss Egan, who bustled about
with a hard, professional manner, and then the rattling, noisy sounds of
Doctor Jenkins’ Ford as he arrived from the village, and the far-off
hoot of a strange motor-horn and a brilliant glare of light as a big
motor rounded the corner of the lane at the foot of the drive and swept
away toward Brook Cottage. The hall seemed suddenly alive with people,
whispering and murmuring together, and there was a sound of hysterical
sobbing from some frightened servant. Death, which ought to occur in the
quiet beauty of solitude, was being robbed of all its dignity. They
would behave like this for days. She knew that it was only now, in the
midst of all that pitiful hubbub, that she had lost her son. He had been
hers still, after a fashion, while she was alone there in the room.
Abruptly, in the midst of the flurry, she remembered that there were
others besides herself. There was Sybil, who had come in and stood
beside her, grave and sympathetic, pressing her mother’s hand in
silence; and Anson, who stood helplessly in the corner, more awkward and
useless and timid than ever in the face of death. But most of all, there
was John Pentland. He was not in the room. He was nowhere to be seen.
She went to search for him, because she knew that he would never come
there to face all the others; instead, he would hide himself away like a
wounded animal. She knew that there was only one person whom he could
bear to see. Together they had fought for the life of the boy and
together they must face the cold, hard fact of his death.
She found him standing on the terrace, outside the tall windows that
opened into the drawing-room, and as she approached, she saw that he was
so lost in his sorrow that he did not even notice her. He was like a man
in a state of enchantment. He simply stood there, tall and stiff and
austere, staring across the marshes in the direction of the sea, alone
as he had always been, surrounded by the tragic armor of loneliness that
none of them, not even herself, had ever succeeded in piercing. She saw
then that there was a grief more terrible than her own. She had lost her
son but for John Pentland it was the end of everything. She saw that the
whole world had collapsed about him. It was as if he, too, had died.
She did not speak to him at first, but simply stood beside him, taking
his huge, bony hand in hers, aware that he did not look at her, but kept
staring on and on across the marshes in the direction of the sea. And at
last she said softly, “It has happened, at last.”
Still he did not look at her, but he did answer, saying, “I knew,” in a
whisper that was barely audible. There were tears on his leathery old
cheeks. He had come out into the darkness of the scented garden to weep.
It was the only time that she had ever seen tears in the burning black
eyes.
* * * * *
Not until long after midnight did all the subdued and vulgar hubbub that
surrounds death fade away once more into silence, leaving Olivia alone
in the room with Sybil. They did not speak to each other, for they knew
well enough the poverty of words, and there was between them no need for
speech.
At last Olivia said, “You had best get some sleep, darling; to-morrow
will be a troublesome day.”
And then, like a little girl, Sybil came over and seating herself on her
mother’s lap put her arms about her neck and kissed her.
The girl said softly, “You are wonderful, Mother. I know that I’ll never
be so wonderful a woman. We should have spared you to-night, all of us,
and instead of that, it was you who managed everything.” Olivia only
kissed her and even smiled a little at Sybil. “I think he’s happier.
He’ll never be tired again as he used to be.”
She had risen to leave when both of them heard, far away, somewhere in
the distance, the sound of music. It came to them vaguely and in
snatches borne in by the breeze from the sea, music that was filled with
a wild, barbaric beat, that rose and fell with a passionate sense of
life. It seemed to Olivia that there was in the sound of it some dark
power which, penetrating the stillness of the old house, shattered the
awesome silence that had settled down at last with the approach of
death. It was as if life were celebrating its victory over death, in a
savage, wild, exultant triumph.
It was music, too, that sounded strange and passionate in the thin,
clear air of the New England night, such music as none of them had ever
heard there before; and slowly, as it rose to a wild crescendo of sound,
Olivia recognized it--the glowing barbaric music of the tribal dances in
_Prince Igor_, being played brilliantly with a sense of abandoned joy.
At the same moment Sybil looked at her mother and said, “It’s Jean de
Cyon.... I’d forgotten that he was arriving to-night.” And then sadly,
“Of course he doesn’t know.”
There was a sudden light in the girl’s eye, the merest flicker, dying
out again quickly, which had a strange, intimate relation to the
passionate music. Again it was life triumphing in death. Long afterward
Olivia remembered it well ... the light of something which went on and
on.
CHAPTER VII
1
The news reached Aunt Cassie only the next morning at ten and it brought
her, full of reproaches and tears, over the dusty lanes to Pentlands.
She was hurt, she said, because they had not let her know at once. “I
should have risen from my bed and come over immediately,” she repeated.
“I was sleeping very badly, in any case. I could have managed
everything. You should have sent for Aunt Cassie at once.”
And Olivia could not tell her that they had kept her in ignorance for
that very reason--because they knew she _would_ rise from her bed and
come over at once.
Aunt Cassie it was who took the burden of the grief upon her narrow
shoulders. She wept in the manner of a professional mourner. She drew
the shades in the drawing-room, because in her mind death was not
respectable unless the rooms were darkened, and sat there in a corner
receiving callers, as if she were the one most bereft, as if indeed she
were the only one who suffered at all. She returned to her own cupolaed
dwelling only late at night and took all her meals at Pentlands, to the
annoyance of her brother, who on the second day in the midst of lunch
turned to her abruptly and said: “Cassie, if you can’t stop this eternal
blubbering, I wish you’d eat at home. It doesn’t help anything.”
At which she had risen from the table, in a sudden climax of grief and
persecution, to flee, sobbing and hurt, from the room. But she was not
insulted sufficiently to take her meals at home. She stayed on at
Pentlands because, she said, “They needed some one like me to help
out....” And to the trembling, inefficient Miss Peavey, who came and
went like a frightened rabbit on errands for her, she confided her
astonishment that her brother and Olivia should treat death with such
indifference. They did not weep; they showed no signs of grief. She was
certain that they lacked sensibility. They did not feel the tragedy.
And, weeping again, she would launch into memories of the days when the
boy had come as a little fellow to sit, pale and listless, on the floor
of her big, empty drawing-room, turning the pages of the Doré Bible.
And to Miss Peavey she also said, “It’s at times like this that one’s
breeding comes out. Olivia has failed for the first time. She doesn’t
understand the things one must do at a time like this. If she had been
brought up properly, here among us....”
For with Aunt Cassie death was a mechanical, formalized affair which one
observed by a series of traditional gestures.
It was a remarkable bit of luck, she said, that Bishop Smallwood
(Sabine’s Apostle to the Genteel) was still in the neighborhood and
could conduct the funeral services. It was proper that one of Pentland
blood should bury a Pentland (as if no one else were quite worthy of
such an honor). And she went to see the Bishop to discuss the matter of
the services. She planned that immensely intricate affair, the seating
of relations and connections--all the Canes and Struthers and Mannerings
and Sutherlands and Pentlands--at the church. She called on Sabine to
tell her that whatever her feelings about funerals might be, it was her
duty to attend this one. Sabine must remember that she was back again in
a world of civilized people who behaved as ladies and gentlemen. And to
each caller whom she received in the darkened drawing-room, she confided
the fact that Sabine must be an unfeeling, inhuman creature, because she
had not even paid a visit to Pentlands.
But she did not know what Olivia and John Pentland knew--that Sabine had
written a short, abrupt, almost incoherent note, with all the worn,
tattered, pious old phrases missing, which had meant more to them than
any of the cries and whispering and confusion that went on belowstairs,
where the whole countryside passed in and out in an endless procession.
When Miss Peavey was not at hand to run errands for her, she made Anson
her messenger.... Anson, who wandered about helpless and lost and
troubled because death had interrupted the easy, eventless flow of a
life in which usually all moved according to a set plan. Death had upset
the whole household. It was impossible to know how Anson Pentland felt
over the death of his son. He did not speak at all, and now that “The
Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” had been laid aside in
the midst of the confusion and Mr. Lowell’s desk stood buried beneath
floral offerings, there was nothing to do but wander about getting in
the way of every one and drawing upon his head the sharp reproofs of
Aunt Cassie.
It was Aunt Cassie and Anson who opened the great box of roses that came
from O’Hara. It was Aunt Cassie’s thin, blue-veined hand that tore open
the envelope addressed plainly to “Mrs. Anson Pentland.” It was Aunt
Cassie who forced Anson to read what was written inside:
“_Dear Mrs. Pentland_,
_You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more._
_Michael O’Hara._”
And it was Aunt Cassie who said, “Impertinent! Why should he send
flowers at all?” And Aunt Cassie who read the note again and again, as
if she might find in some way a veiled meaning behind the two cryptic
sentences. It was Aunt Cassie who carried the note to Olivia and
watched her while she read it and laid it quietly aside on her
dressing-table. And when she had discovered nothing she said to Olivia,
“It seems to me impertinent of him to send flowers and write such a
note. What is he to us here at Pentlands?”
Olivia looked at her a little wearily and said, “What does it matter
whether he is impertinent or not? Besides, he was a great friend of
Jack’s.” And then, straightening her tired body, she looked at Aunt
Cassie and said slowly, “He is also a friend of mine.”
It was the first time that the division of forces had stood revealed,
even for a second, the first time that Olivia had shown any feeling for
O’Hara, and there was something ominous in the quietness of a speech
made so casually. She ended any possible discussion by leaving the room
in search of Anson, leaving Aunt Cassie disturbed by the sensation of
alarm which attacked her when she found herself suddenly face to face
with the mysterious and perilous calm that sometimes took possession of
Olivia. Left alone in the room, she took up the note again from the
dressing-table and read it through for the twentieth time. There was
nothing in it ... nothing on which one could properly even pin a
suspicion.
So, in the midst of death, enveloped by the odor of tuberoses, the old
lady rose triumphant, a phoenix from ashes. In some way she found in
tragedy her proper rôle and she managed to draw most of the light from
the other actors to herself. She must have known that people went away
from the house saying, “Cassie rises to such occasions beautifully. She
has taken everything on her own shoulders.” She succeeded in conveying
the double impression that she suffered far more than any of the others
and that none of the others could possibly have done without her.
And then into the midst of her triumph came the worst that could have
happened. Olivia was the first to learn of the calamity as she always
came to know before any of the others knowledge which old John Pentland
possessed; and the others would never have known until the sad business
of the funeral was over save for Aunt Cassie’s implacable curiosity.
On the second day, Olivia, summoned by her father-in-law to come to the
library, found him there as she had found him so many times before, grim
and silent and repressed, only this time there was something
inexpressibly tragic and broken in his manner.
She did not speak to him; she simply waited until, looking up at last,
he said almost in a whisper, “Horace Pentland’s body is at the Durham
station.”
And he looked at her with the quick, pitiful helplessness of a strong
man who has suddenly grown weak and old, as if at last he had come to
the end of his strength and was turning now to her. It was then for the
first time that she began to see how she was in a way a prisoner, that
from now on, as one day passed into another, the whole life at Pentlands
would come to be more and more her affair. There was no one to take the
place of the old man ... no one, save herself.
“What shall we do?” he asked in the same low voice. “I don’t know. I am
nearly at the end of things.”
“We could bury them together,” said Olivia softly. “We could have a
double funeral.”
He looked at her in astonishment. “You wouldn’t mind that?” and when she
shook her head in answer, he replied: “But we can’t do it. There seems
to me something wrong in such an idea.... I can’t explain what I
mean.... It oughtn’t to be done.... A boy like Jack and an old reprobate
like Horace.”
They would have settled it quietly between them as they had settled so
many troubles in the last years when John Pentland had come to her for
strength, but at that moment the door opened suddenly and, without
knocking, Aunt Cassie appeared, her eyes really blazing with an angry,
hysterical light, her hair all hanging in little iron-gray wisps about
her narrow face.
“What is it?” she asked. “What has gone wrong? I know there’s something,
and you’ve no right to keep it from me.” She was shrill and brittle, as
if in those two days all the pleasure and activity surrounding death had
driven her into an orgy of excitement. At the sound of her voice, both
Olivia and John Pentland started abruptly. She had touched them on
nerves raw and worn.
The thin, high-pitched voice went on. “I’ve given up all my time to
arranging things. I’ve barely slept. I sacrifice myself to you all day
and night and I’ve a right to know.” It was as if she had sensed the
slow breaking up of the old man and sought now to hurl him aside, to
depose him as head of the family, in one great _coup d’état_, setting
herself up there in his place, a thin, fiercely intolerant tyrant; as if
at last she had given up her old subtle way of trying to gain her ends
by intrigue through the men of the family. She stood ready now to set up
a matriarchy, the last refuge of a family whose strength was gone. She
had risen thus in the same way once before within the memory of Olivia,
in those long months when Mr. Struthers, fading slowly into death,
yielded her the victory.
John Pentland sighed, profoundly, wearily, and murmured, “It’s nothing,
Cassie. It would only trouble you. Olivia and I are settling it.”
But she did not retreat. Standing there, she held her ground and
continued the tirade, working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. “I
won’t be put aside. No one ever tells me anything. For years now I’ve
been shut out as if I were half-witted. Frail as I am, I work myself to
the bone for the family and don’t even get a word of thanks.... Why is
Olivia always preferred to your own sister?” And tears of luxurious,
sensual, self-pity began to stream down her withered face. She began
even to mumble and mix her words, and she abandoned herself completely
to the fleshly pleasure of hysterics.
Olivia, watching her quietly, saw that this was no usual occasion. This
was, in truth, the new Aunt Cassie whom Sabine had revealed to her a few
days before ... the aggressively virginal Aunt Cassie who had been born
in that moment on the terrace to take the place of the old Aunt Cassie
who had existed always in an aura of tears and good works and sympathy.
She understood now what she had never understood before--that Aunt
Cassie was not merely an irrational hypochondriac, a harmless, pitiful
creature, but a ruthless and unscrupulous force. She knew that behind
this emotional debauch there lay some deeply conceived plan. Vaguely she
suspected that the plan was aimed at subduing herself, or bringing her
(Olivia) completely under the will of the old woman. It was the insect
again beating its wings frantically against the windows of a world which
she could never enter....
And softly Olivia said, “Surely, Aunt Cassie, there is no need to make a
scene ... there’s no need to be vulgar ... at a time like this.”
The old woman, suddenly speechless, looked at her brother, but from him
there came no sign of aid or succor; she must have seen, plainly, that
he had placed himself on the side of Olivia ... the outsider, who had
dared to accuse a Pentland of being vulgar.
“You heard what she said, John.... You heard what she said! She called
your sister vulgar!” But her hysterical mood began to abate suddenly, as
if she saw that she had chosen, after all, the wrong plan of attack.
Olivia did not answer her. She only sat there, looking pale and patient
and beautiful in her black clothes, waiting. It was a moment unfair to
Aunt Cassie. No man, even Anson, would have placed himself against
Olivia just then.
“If you must know, Cassie ...” the old man said slowly. “It’s a thing
you won’t want to hear. But if you must know, it is simply that Horace
Pentland’s body is at the station in Durham.”
Olivia had a quick sense of the whited sepulcher beginning to crack, to
fall slowly into bits.
At first Aunt Cassie only stared at them, snuffling and wiping her red
eyes, and then she said, in an amazingly calm voice, “You see.... You
never tell me anything. I never knew he was dead.” There was a touch of
triumph and vindication in her manner.
“There was no need of telling you, Cassie,” said the old man. “You
wouldn’t let his name be spoken in the family for years. It was you--you
and Anson--who made me threaten him into living abroad. Why should you
care when he died?”
Aunt Cassie showed signs of breaking down once more. “You see, I’m
always blamed for everything. I was thinking of the family all these
years. We couldn’t have Horace running around loose in Boston.” She
broke off with a sudden, fastidious gesture of disgust, as if she were
washing her hands of the whole affair. “I could have managed it better
myself. He ought never to have been brought home ... to stir it all up
again.”
Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt
Cassie. “He wanted to be buried here.... He wrote to ask me, when he was
dying.”
“He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his
behavior. I say it again and I’ll keep on saying it. He ought never to
have been brought back here ... after people even forgot whether he was
alive or dead.”
The perilous calm had settled over Olivia.... She had been looking out
of the window across the marshes into the distance, and when she turned
she spoke with a terrible quietness. She said: “You may do with Horace
Pentland’s body what you like. It is more your affair than mine, for I
never saw him in my life. But it is _my_ son who is dead ... _my_ son,
who belongs to _me_ more than to any of you. You may bury Horace
Pentland on the same day ... at the same service, even in the same
grave. Things like that can’t matter very much after death. You can’t go
on pretending forever.... Death is too strong for that. It’s stronger
than any of us puny creatures because it’s the one truth we can’t avoid.
It’s got nothing to do with prejudices and pride and respectability. In
a hundred years--even in a year, in a month, what will it matter what
we’ve done with Horace Pentland’s body?”
She rose, still enveloped in the perilous calm, and said: “I’ll leave
Horace Pentland to you two. There is none of his blood in my veins.
Whatever you do, I shall not object ... only I wouldn’t be too shabby in
dealing with death.”
She went out, leaving Aunt Cassie exhausted and breathless and confused.
The old woman had won her battle about the burial of Horace Pentland,
yet she had suffered a great defeat. She must have seen that she had
really lost everything, for Olivia somehow had gone to the root of
things, in the presence of John Pentland, who was himself so near to
death. (Olivia daring to say proudly, as if she actually scorned the
Pentland name, “There is none of his blood in my veins.”)
But it was a defeat which Olivia knew she would never admit: that was
one of the qualities which made it impossible to deal with Aunt Cassie.
Perhaps, even as she sat there dabbing at her eyes, she was choosing new
weapons for a struggle which had come at last into the open because it
was impossible any longer to do battle through so weak and shifting an
ally as Anson.
She was a natural martyr, Aunt Cassie. Martyrdom was the great feminine
weapon of her Victorian day and she was practised in it; she had learned
all its subtleties in the years she had lain wrapped in a shawl on a
sofa subduing the full-blooded Mr. Struthers.
And Olivia knew as she left the room that in the future she would have
to deal with a poor, abused, invalid aunt who gave all her strength in
doing good works and received in return only cruelty and heartlessness
from an outsider, from an intruder, a kind of adventuress who had wormed
her way into the heart of the Pentland family. Aunt Cassie, by a kind of
art of which she possessed the secret, would somehow make it all seem
so.
2
The heat did not go away. It hung in a quivering cloud over the whole
countryside, enveloping the black procession which moved through the
lanes into the highroad and thence through the clusters of ugly stucco
bungalows inhabited by the mill-workers, on its way past the deserted
meeting-house where Preserved Pentland had once harangued a tough and
sturdy congregation and the Rev. Josiah Milford had set out with his
flock for the Western Reserve.... It enveloped the black, slow-moving
procession to the very doors of the cool, ivy-covered stone church
(built like a stage piece to imitate some English county church) where
the Pentlands worshiped the more polite, compromising gods scorned and
berated by the witch-burner. On the way, beneath the elms of High
Street, Polish women and children stopped to stare and cross themselves
at the sight of the grand procession.
The little church seemed peaceful after the heat and the stir of the
Durham street, peaceful and hushed and crowded to the doors by the
relatives and connections of the family. Even the back pews were filled
by the poor half-forgotten remnants of the family who had no wealth to
carry them smoothly along the stream of life. Old Mrs. Featherstone (who
did washing) was there sobbing because she sobbed at all funerals, and
old Miss Haddon, the genteel Pentland cousin, dressed even in the midst
of summer in her inevitable cape of thick black broadcloth, and Mrs.
Malson, shabby-genteel in her foulards and high-pitched bonnet, and Miss
Murgatroyd whose bullfinch house was now “Ye Witch’s Broome” where one
got bad tea and melancholy sandwiches....
Together Bishop Smallwood and Aunt Cassie had planned a service
calculated skilfully to harrow the feelings and give full scope to the
vast emotional capacities of their generation and background.
They chose the most emotional of hymns, and Bishop Smallwood, renowned
for his effect upon pious and sentimental old ladies, said a few
insincere and pompous words which threw Aunt Cassie and poor old Mrs.
Featherstone into fresh excesses of grief. The services for the boy
became a barbaric rite dedicated not to his brief and pathetic existence
but to a glorification of the name he bore and of all those traits--the
narrowness, the snobbery, the lower middle-class respect for
property--which had culminated in the lingering tragedy of his sickly
life. In their respective pews Anson and Aunt Cassie swelled with pride
at the mention of the Pentland ancestry. Even the sight of the vigorous,
practical, stocky Polish women staring round-eyed at the funeral
procession a little before, returned to them now in a wave of pride and
secret elation. The same emotion in some way filtered back through the
little church from the pulpit where Bishop Smallwood (with the sob in
his voice which had won him prizes at the seminary) stood surrounded by
midsummer flowers, through all the relatives and connections, until far
in the back among the more obscure and remote ones it became simply a
pride in their relation to New England and the ancient dying village
that was fast disappearing beneath the inroads of a more vigorous
world. Something of the Pentland enchantment engulfed them all, even old
Mrs. Featherstone, with her poor back bent from washing to support the
four defective grandchildren who ought never to have been born. Through
her facile tears (she wept because it was the only pleasure left her)
there shone the light of a pride in belonging to these people who had
persecuted witches and evolved transcendentalism and Mr. Lowell and
Doctor Holmes and the good, kind Mr. Longfellow. It raised her somehow
above the level of those hardy foreigners who worshiped the Scarlet
Woman of Rome and jostled her on the sidewalks of High Street.
In all the little church there were only two or three, perhaps, who
escaped that sudden mystical surge of self-satisfaction.... O’Hara, who
was forever outside the caste, and Olivia and old John Pentland, sitting
there side by side so filled with sorrow that they did not even resent
the antics of Bishop Smallwood. Sabine (who had come, after all, to the
services) sensed the intensity of the engulfing emotion. It filled her
with a sense of slow, cold, impotent rage.
As the little procession left the church, wiping its eyes and murmuring
in lugubrious tones, the clouds which a little earlier had sprung up
against the distant horizon began to darken the whole sky. The air
became so still that the leaves on the tall, drooping elms hung as
motionless as leaves in a painted picture, and far away, gently at
first, and then with a slow, increasing menace, rose the sound of
distant echoing thunder. Ill at ease, the mourners gathered in little
groups about the steps, regarding alternately the threatening sky and
the waiting hearse, and presently, one by one, the more timorous ones
began to drift sheepishly away. Others followed them slowly until by the
time the coffin was borne out, they had all melted away save for the
members of the “immediate family” and one or two others. Sabine
remained, and O’Hara and old Mrs. Soames (leaning on John Pentland’s
arm as if it were her grandson who was dead), and old Miss Haddon in her
black cape, and the pall-bearers, and of course Bishop Smallwood and the
country rector who, in the presence of this august and saintly pillar of
the church, had faded to insignificance. Besides these there were one or
two other relatives, like Struthers Pentland, a fussy little bald man
(cousin of John Pentland and of the disgraceful Horace), who had never
married but devoted himself instead to fathering the boys of his classes
at Harvard.
It was this little group which entered the motors and hurried off after
the hearse in its shameless race with the oncoming storm.
* * * * *
The town burial-ground lay at the top of a high, bald hill where the
first settlers of Durham had chosen to dispose of their dead, and the
ancient roadway that led up to it was far too steep and stony to permit
the passing of motors, so that part way up the hill the party was forced
to descend and make the remainder of the journey on foot. As they
assembled, silently but in haste, about the open, waiting grave, the
sound of the thunder accompanied now by wild flashes of lightning, drew
nearer and nearer, and the leaves of the stunted trees and shrubs which
a moment before had been so still, began to dance and shake madly in the
green light that preceded the storm.
Bishop Smallwood, by nature a timorous man, stood beside the grave
opening his jewel-encrusted Prayer Book (he was very High Church and
fond of incense and precious stones) and fingering the pages nervously,
now looking down at them, now regarding the stolid Polish grave-diggers
who stood about waiting to bury the last of the Pentlands. There were
irritating small delays, but at last everything was ready and the
Bishop, reading as hastily as he dared, began the service in a voice
less rich and theatrical than usual.
“_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord...._”
And what followed was lost in a violent crash of thunder so that the
Bishop was able to omit a line or two without being discovered. The few
trees on the bald hill began to sway and rock, bending low toward the
earth, and the crape veils of the women performed wild black writhings.
In the uproar of wind and thunder only a sentence or two of the service
became audible....
“_For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that
the past is as a watch in the night...._”
And then again a wild, angry Nature took possession of the services,
drowning out the anxious voice of the Bishop and the loud theatrical
sobs of Aunt Cassie, and again there was a sudden breathless hush and
the sound of the Bishop’s voice, so pitiful and insignificant in the
midst of the storm, reading....
“_O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto
wisdom._”
And again:
“_For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God in His Providence to take
out of the world the soul of our deceased brother._”
And at last, with relief, the feeble, reedlike voice, repeating with
less monotony than usual: “_The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the
Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all
evermore. Amen._”
Sabine, in whose hard nature there lay some hidden thing which exulted
in storms, barely heard the service. She stood there watching the wild
beauty of the sky and the distant sea and the marshes and thinking how
different a thing the burial of the first Pentland must have been from
the timorous, hurried rite that marked the passing of the last. She
kept seeing those first fanatical, hard-faced, rugged Puritans standing
above their tombs like ghosts watching ironically the genteel figure of
the Apostle to the Genteel and his jeweled Prayer Book....
* * * * *
The Polish grave-diggers set about their work stolidly indifferent to
the storm, and before the first motor had started down the steep and
stony path, the rain came with a wild, insane violence, sweeping inward
in a wall across the sea and the black marshes. Sabine, at the door of
her motor, raised her head and breathed deeply, as if the savage,
destructive force of the storm filled her with a kind of ecstasy.
* * * * *
On the following day, cool after the storm and bright and clear, a
second procession made its way up the stony path to the top of the bald
hill, only this time Bishop Smallwood was not there, nor Cousin
Struthers Pentland, for they had both been called away suddenly and
mysteriously. And Anson Pentland was not there because he would have
nothing to do with a blackguard like Horace Pentland, even in death. In
the little group about the open grave stood Olivia and John Pentland and
Aunt Cassie, who had come because, after all, the dead man’s name was
Pentland, and Miss Haddon, (in her heavy broadcloth cape), who never
missed any funeral and had learned about this one from her friend, the
undertaker, who kept her perpetually _au courant_. There were not even
any friends to carry the coffin to the grave, and so this labor was
divided between the undertaker’s men and the grave-diggers....
And the service began again, read this time by the rector, who since
the departure of the Bishop seemed to have grown a foot in stature....
“_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord...._
“_For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is
past as a watch in the night...._
“_O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto
wisdom._”
Aunt Cassie wept again, though the performance was less good than on the
day before, but Olivia and John Pentland stood in silence while Horace
Pentland was buried at last in the midst of that little colony of grim
and respectable dead.
Sabine was there, too, standing at a little distance, as if she had a
contempt for all funerals. She had known Horace Pentland in life and she
had gone to see him in his long exile whenever her wanderings led her to
the south of France, less from affection than because it irritated the
others in the family. (He must have been happier in that warm, rich
country than he could ever have been in this cold, stony land.) But she
had come to-day less for sentimental reasons than because it gave her
the opportunity of a triumph over Aunt Cassie. She could watch Aunt
Cassie out of her cold green eyes while they all stood about to bury the
family skeleton. Sabine, who had not been to a funeral in the
twenty-five years since her father’s death, had climbed the stony hill
to the Durham town burial-ground twice in as many days....
The rector was speaking again....
“_The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the
Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen._”
The little group turned away in silence, and in silence disappeared over
the rim of the hill down the steep path. The secret burial was finished
and Horace Pentland was left alone with the Polish grave-diggers, come
home at last.
3
The peace which had taken possession of Olivia as she sat alone by the
side of her dead son, returned to her slowly with the passing of the
excitement over the funeral. Indeed, she was for once thankful for the
listless, futile enchantment which invested the quiet old world. It
soothed her at a moment when, all interest having departed from life,
she wanted merely to be left in peace. She came to see for a certainty
that there was no tragedy in her son’s death; the only tragedy had been
that he had ever lived at all such a baffled, painful, hopeless
existence. And now, after so many years of anxiety, there was peace and
a relaxation that seemed strange and in a way delicious ... moments
when, lying in the chaise longue by the window overlooking the marshes,
she was enveloped by deep and healing solitude. Even the visits of Aunt
Cassie, who would have forced her way into Olivia’s room in the
interests of “duty,” made only a vague, dreamlike impression. The old
lady became more and more a droning, busy insect, the sound of whose
buzzing grew daily more distant and vague, like the sound of a fly
against a window-pane heard through veils of sleep.
From her window she sometimes had a distant view of the old man, riding
alone now, in the trap across the fields behind the old white horse, and
sometimes she caught a glimpse of his lean figure riding the savage red
mare along the lanes. He no longer went alone with the mare; he had
yielded to Higgins’ insistent warnings of her bad temper and permitted
the groom to go with him, always at his side or a little behind to guard
him, riding a polo pony with an ease and grace which made horse and man
seem a single creature ... a kind of centaur. On a horse the ugliness
of the robust, animal little man seemed to flow away. It was as if he
had been born thus, on a horse, and was awkward and ill at ease with his
feet on the earth.
And Olivia knew the thought that was always in the mind of her
father-in-law as he rode across the stony, barren fields. He was
thinking all the while that all this land, all this fortune, even Aunt
Cassie’s carefully tended pile, would one day belong to a family of some
other name, perhaps a name which he had never even heard.
There were no more Pentlands. Sybil and her husband would be rich,
enormously so, with the Pentland money and Olivia’s money ... but there
would never be any more Pentlands. It had all come to an end in this ...
futility and oblivion. In another hundred years the name would exist, if
it existed at all, only as a memory, embalmed within the pages of
Anson’s book.
The new melancholy which settled over the house came in the end even to
touch the spirit of Sybil, so young and so eager for experience, like a
noxious mildew. Olivia noticed it first in a certain shadowy
listlessness that seemed to touch every action of the girl, and then in
an occasional faint sigh of weariness, and in the visits the girl paid
her in her room, and in the way she gave up willingly evenings at Brook
Cottage to stay at home with her mother. She saw that Sybil, who had
always been so eager, was touched by the sense of futility which she
(Olivia) had battled for so long. And Sybil, Sybil of them all, alone
possessed the chance of being saved.
She thought, “I must not come to lean on her. I must not be the sort of
mother who spoils the life of her child.”
And when John Pentland came to sit listlessly by her side, sometimes in
silence, sometimes making empty speeches that meant nothing in an effort
to cover his despair, she saw that he, too, had come to her for the
strength which she alone could give him. Even old Mrs. Soames had
failed him, for she lay ill again and able to see him only for a few
minutes each day. (It was Sabine’s opinion, uttered during one of her
morning visits, that these strange sudden illnesses came from overdoses
of drugs.)
So she came to see that she was being a coward to abandon the struggle
now, and she rose one morning almost at dawn to put on her
riding-clothes and set out with Sybil across the wet meadows to meet
O’Hara. She returned with something of her pallor gone and a manner
almost of gaiety, her spirit heightened by the air, the contact with
O’Hara and the sense of having taken up the struggle once more.
Sabine, always watchful, noticed the difference and put it down to the
presence of O’Hara alone, and in this she was not far wrong, for set
down there in Durham, he affected Olivia powerfully as one who had no
past but only a future. With him she could talk of things which lay
ahead--of his plans for the farm he had bought, of Sybil’s future, of
his own reckless, irresistible career.
* * * * *
O’Hara himself had come to a dangerous state of mind. He was one of
those men who seek fame and success less for the actual rewards than for
the satisfaction of the struggle, the fierce pleasure of winning with
all the chances against one. He had won successes already. He had his
house, his horses, his motor, his well-tailored clothes, and he knew the
value of these things, not only in the world of Durham, but in the slums
and along the wharves of Boston. He had no illusions about the imperfect
workings of democracy. He knew (perhaps because, having begun at the
very bottom, he had fought his way very near to the top) that the poor
man expects a politician to be something of a splendorous affair,
especially when he has begun his career as a very common and ordinary
sort of poor man. O’Hara was not playing his game foolishly or
recklessly. When he visited the slums or sat in at political meetings,
he was a sort of universal common man, a brother to all. When he
addressed a large meeting or presided at an assembly, he arrived in a
glittering motor and appeared in the elegant clothes suitable to a
representative of the government, of power; and so he reflected credit
on those men who had played with him as boys along India Wharf and
satisfied the universal hunger in man for something more splendorous
than the machinery of a perfect democracy.
He understood the game perfectly and made no mistakes, for he had had
the best of all training--that of knowing all sorts of people in all
sorts of conditions. In himself, he embodied them all, if the simple and
wholly kindly and honest were omitted; for he was really not a simple
man nor a wholly honest one and he was too ruthless to be kindly. He
understood people (as Sabine had guessed), with their little prides and
vanities and failings and ambitions.
Aunt Cassie and Anson in the rigidity of their minds had been unjust in
thinking that their world was the goal of his ambitions. They had, in
the way of those who depend on their environment as a justification for
their own existence, placed upon it a value out of all proportion in the
case of a man like O’Hara. To them it was everything, the ultimate to be
sought on this earth, and so they supposed it must seem to O’Hara. It
would have been impossible for them to believe that he considered it
only as a small part of his large scheme of life and laid siege to it
principally for the pleasure that he found in the battle; for it was
true that O’Hara, once he had won, would not know what to do with the
fruits of his victory.
Already he himself had begun to see this. He had begun to understand
that the victory was so easy that the battle held little savor for him.
Moments of satisfaction such as that which had overtaken him as he sat
talking to Sabine were growing more and more rare ... moments when he
would stop and think, “Here am I, Michael O’Hara, a nobody ... son of a
laborer and a housemaid, settled in the midst of such a world as Durham,
talking to such a woman as Mrs. Cane Callendar.”
No, the savor was beginning to fail, to go out of the struggle. He was
beginning to be bored, and as he grew bored he grew also restless and
unhappy.
Born in the Roman Catholic church, he was really neither a very
religious nor a very superstitious man. He was skeptic enough not to
believe all the faiths the church sought to impose upon him, yet he was
not skeptic enough to find peace of mind in an artificial will to
believe. For so long a time he had relied wholly upon himself that the
idea of leaning for support, even in lonely, restless moments, upon a
God or a church, never even occurred to him. He remained outwardly a
Roman Catholic because by denying the faith he would have incurred the
enmity of the church and many thousands of devout Irish and Italians.
The problem simply did not concern him deeply one way or the other.
And so he had come, guided for the moment by no very strong passion,
into the doldrums of confusion and boredom. Even his fellow-politicians
in Boston saw the change in him and complained that he displayed no very
great interest in the campaign to send him to Congress. He behaved at
times as if it made not the slightest difference to him whether he was
elected to Congress or not ... he, this Michael O’Hara who was so
valuable to his party, so engaging and shrewd, who could win for it
almost anything he chose.
And though he took care that no one should divine it, this strange state
of mind troubled him more deeply than any of his friends. He was
assailed by the certainty that there was something lacking from his
life, something very close to the foundations. Now that he was inactive
and bored, he had begun to think of himself for the first time. The
fine, glorious burst of first youth, when everything seemed part of a
splendid game, was over and done now, and he felt himself slipping away
toward the borderland of middle-age. Because he was a man of energy and
passion, who loved life, he felt the change with a keen sense of
sadness. There was a kind of horror for him in the idea of a lowered
tempo of life--a fear that filled him at times with a passionately
satisfactory sort of Gaelic melancholy.
In such moments, he had quite honestly taken stock of all he possessed,
and found the amassed result bitterly unsatisfactory. He had a good
enough record. He was decidedly more honorable than most men in such a
dirty business as politics--indeed, far more honorable and freer from
spites and nastinesses than many of those who had come out of this very
sacred Durham world. He had made enough money in the course of his
career, and he was winning his battle in Durham. Yet at thirty-five life
had begun to slacken, to lose some of that zest which once had led him
to rise every morning bursting with animal spirits, his brain all
a-glitter with fascinating schemes.
And then, in the very midst of this perilous state of mind, he
discovered one morning that the old sensation of delight at rising had
returned to him, only it was not because his brain was filled with
fascinating schemes. He arose with an interest in life because he knew
that in a little while he would see Olivia Pentland. He arose, eager to
fling himself on his horse and, riding across the meadows, to wait by
the abandoned gravel-pit until he saw her coming over the dew-covered
fields, radiant, it seemed to him, as the morning itself. On the days
when she did not come it was as if the bottom had dropped out of his
whole existence.
It was not that he was a man encountering the idea of woman for the
first time. There had been women in his life always, since the very
first bedraggled Italian girl he had met as a boy among the piles of
lumber along the wharves. There had been women always because it was
impossible for a man so vigorous and full of zest, so ruthless and so
scornful, to have lived thirty-five years without them, and because he
was an attractive man, filled when he chose to be, with guile and charm,
whom women found it difficult to resist. There had been plenty of women,
kept always in the background, treated as a necessity and prevented
skilfully from interfering with the more important business of making a
career.
But with Olivia Pentland, something new and disturbing had happened to
him ... something which, in his eagerness to encompass all life and
experience, possessed an overwhelming sensuous fascination. She was not
simply another woman in a procession of considerable length. Olivia
Pentland, he found, was different from any of the others ... a woman of
maturity, poised, beautiful, charming and intelligent, and besides all
these things she possessed for him a kind of fresh and iridescent bloom,
the same freshness, only a little saddened, that touched her young
daughter.
In the beginning, when they had talked together while she planned the
garden at Brook Cottage, he had found himself watching her, lost in a
kind of wonder, so that he scarcely understood what she was saying. And
all the while he kept thinking, “Here is a wonderful woman ... the most
wonderful I’ve ever seen or will ever see again ... a woman who could
make life a different affair for me, who would make of love something
which people say it is.”
She had affected him thus in a way that swept aside all the vulgar and
cynical coarseness with which a man of such experience is likely to
invest the whole idea of woman. Until now women had seemed to him made
to entertain men or to provide children for them, and now he saw that
there was, after all, something in this sentiment with which people
surrounded a love affair. For a long time he searched for a word to
describe Olivia and in the end he fell back upon the old well-worn one
which she always brought to mind. She was a “lady”--and as such she had
an overwhelming effect upon his imagination.
He had said to himself that here was a woman who could understand him,
not in the aloof, analytical fashion of a clever woman like Sabine
Callendar, but in quite another way. She was a woman to whom he could
say, “I am thus and so. My life has been of this kind. My motives are of
this sort,” and she would understand, the bad with the good. She would
be the one person in the world to whom he could pour out the whole
burden of secrets, the one woman who could ever destroy the weary sense
of loneliness which sometimes afflicted him. She made him feel that, for
all his shrewdness and hard-headed scheming, she was far wiser than he
would ever be, that in a way he was a small boy who might come to her
and, burying his head in her lap, have her stroke his thick black hair.
She would understand that there were times when a man wanted to be
treated thus. In her quiet way she was a strong woman, unselfish, too,
who did not feed upon flattery and perpetual attention, the sort of
woman who is precious to a man bent upon a career. The thought of her
filled him with a poignant feeling of sadness, but in his less romantic
moments he saw, too, that she held the power of catching him up out of
his growing boredom. She would be of great value to him.
And so Sabine had not been far wrong when she thought of him as the
small boy sitting on the curbstone who had looked up at her gravely and
said, “I’m playing.” He was at times very like such an image.
But in the end he was always brought up abruptly against the hard
reality of the fact that she was already married to a man who did not
want her himself but who would never set her free, a man who perhaps
would have sacrificed everything in the world to save a scandal in his
family. And beyond these hard, tangible difficulties he discerned, too,
the whole dark decaying web, less obvious but none the less potent, in
which she had become enmeshed.
Yet these obstacles only created a fascination to a mind so complex, so
perverse, for in the solitude of his mind and in the bitterness of the
long struggle he had known, he came to hold the whole world in contempt
and saw no reason why he should not take what he wanted from this Durham
world. Obstacles such as these provided the material for a new battle, a
new source of interest in the turbulent stream of his existence; only
this time there was a difference ... that he coveted the prize itself
more than the struggle. He wanted Olivia Pentland, strangely enough, not
for a moment or even for a month or a year, but for always.
He waited because he understood, in the shrewdness of his long
experience, that to be insistent would only startle such a woman and
cause him to lose her entirely, and because he knew of no plan of action
which could overcome the obstacles which kept them apart. He waited, as
he had done many times in his career, for circumstances to solve
themselves. And while he waited, with each time that he saw her she grew
more and more desirable, and his own invincible sense of caution became
weaker and weaker.
4
In those long days spent in her room, Olivia had come slowly to be aware
of the presence of the newcomer at Brook Cottage. It had begun on the
night of Jack’s death with the sound of his music drifting across the
marshes, and after the funeral Sabine had talked of him to Olivia with
an enthusiasm curiously foreign to her. Once or twice she had caught a
glimpse of him crossing the meadows toward O’Hara’s shining chimneys or
going down the road that led through the marshes to the sea--a tall,
red-haired young man who walked with a slight limp. Sybil, she found,
was strangely silent about him, but when she questioned the girl about
her plans for the day she found, more often than not, that they had to
do with him. When she spoke of him, Sybil had a way of blushing and
saying, “He’s very nice, Mother. I’ll bring him over when you want to
see people.... I used to know him in Paris.”
And Olivia, wisely, did not press her questions. Besides, Sabine had
told her almost all there was to know ... perhaps more than Sybil
herself knew.
Sabine said, “He belongs to a rather remarkable family ... wilful,
reckless and full of spirit. His mother is probably the most remarkable
of them all. She’s a charming woman who has lived luxuriously in Paris
most of her life ... not one of the American colony. She doesn’t ape any
one and she’s incapable of pretense of any sort. She’s lived, rather
alone, over there on money ... quite a lot of money ... which seems to
come out of steel-mills in some dirty town of the Middle West. She’s one
of my great friends ... a woman of no intellect, but very beautiful and
blessed with a devastating charm. She is one of the women who was born
for men.... She’s irresistible to them, and I imagine there have been
men in her life always. She was made for men, but her taste is perfect,
so her morals don’t matter.”
The woman ... indeed all Jean de Cyon’s family ... seemed to fascinate
Sabine as she sat having tea with Olivia, for she went on and on,
talking far more than usual, describing the house of Jean’s mother, her
friends, the people whom one met at her dinners, all there was to tell
about her.
“She’s the sort of woman who has existed since the beginning of time.
There’s some mystery about her early life. It has something to do with
Jean’s father. I don’t think she was happy with him. He’s never
mentioned. Of course, she’s married again now to a Frenchman ... much
older than herself ... a man, very distinguished, who has been in three
cabinets. That’s where the boy gets his French name. The old man has
adopted him and treats him like his own son. De Cyon is a good name in
France, one of the best; but of course Jean hasn’t any French blood.
He’s pure American, but he’s never seen his own country until now.”
Sabine finished her tea and putting her cup back on the Regence table
(which had come from Olivia’s mother and so found its graceful way into
a house filled with stiff early American things), she added, “It’s a
remarkable family ... wild and restless. Jean had an aunt who died in
the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, and his cousin is Lilli Barr ... a
really great musician.” She looked out of the window and after a moment
said in a low voice, “Lilli Barr is the woman whom my husband married
... but she divorced him, too, and now we are friends ... she and I.”
The familiar hard, metallic laugh returned and she added, “I imagine our
experience with him made us sympathetic.... You see, I know the family
very well. It’s the sort of blood which produces people with a genius
for life ... for living in the moment.”
She did not say that Jean and his mother and the ruthless cousin Lilli
Barr fascinated her because they stood in a way for the freedom toward
which she had been struggling through all the years since she escaped
from Durham. They were free in a way from countries, from towns, from
laws, from prejudices, even in a way from nationality. She had hoped
once that Jean might interest himself in her own sullen, independent,
clever Thérèse, but in her knowledge of the world she had long ago
abandoned that hope, knowing that a boy so violent and romantic, so
influenced by an upbringing among Frenchmen, a youth so completely
masculine, was certain to seek a girl more soft and gentle and feminine
than Thérèse. She knew it was inevitable that he should fall in love
with a girl like Sybil, and in a way she was content because it fell in
admirably with her own indolent plans. The Pentlands were certain to
look upon Jean de Cyon as a sort of gipsy, and when they knew the whole
truth....
The speculation fascinated her. The summer in Durham, even with the
shadow of Jack’s death flung across it, was not proving as dreadful as
she had feared; and this new development interested her as something she
had never before observed ... an idyllic love affair between two young
people who each seemed to her a perfect, charming creature.
5
It had all begun on the day nearly a year earlier when all Paris was
celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil
had gone with Thérèse and Sabine to lay a wreath beside the flame at the
Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about
which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment). And afterward she
played in the garden with the dogs which they would not let her keep at
the school in Saint-Cloud, and then she had gone into the house to find
there a fascinating and beautiful woman of perhaps fifty--a Madame de
Cyon, who had come to lunch, with her son, a young man of twenty-four,
tall, straight and slender, with red hair and dark blue eyes and a deep,
pleasant voice. On account of the day he was dressed in his cuirassier’s
uniform of black and silver, and because of an old wound he walked with
a slight limp. Almost at once (she remembered this when she thought of
him) he had looked at her in a frank, admiring way which gave her a
sense of pleasurable excitement wholly new in her experience.
Something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the
air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the _Marseillaise_
and the _Sambre et Meuse_, the sight of the soldiers in the street and
the great Arc with the flame burning there ... something in the feel of
Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of
her. It was something which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon
the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.
She knew vaguely that she must have fallen in love in the moment she
stood there in Sabine Callendar’s salon bowing to Lily de Cyon. The
experience had grown in intensity when, after lunch, she took him into
the garden to show him her dogs and watched him rubbing the ears of the
Doberman “Imp” and talking to the dog softly in a way which made her
know that he felt about animals as she did. He had been so pleasant in
his manner, so gentle in his bigness, so easy to talk to, as if they had
always been friends.
And then almost at once he had gone away to the Argentine, without even
seeing her again, on a trip to learn the business of cattle-raising
because he had the idea that one day he might settle himself as a
rancher. But he left behind him a vivid image which with the passing of
time grew more and more intense in the depths of a romantic nature which
revolted at the idea of Thérèse choosing a father scientifically for her
child. It was an image by which she had come, almost unconsciously, to
measure other men, even to such small details as the set of their
shoulders and the way they used their hands and the timbre of their
voices. It was this she had really meant when she said to her mother,
“I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly.” She had
meant, quite without knowing it, that it must be a man like Jean de Cyon
... charming, romantic and a little wild.
She had not forgotten him, though there were moments at the school in
Saint-Cloud when she had believed she would never see him again--moments
when she was swept by a delicious sense of hopeless melancholy in which
she believed that her whole life had been blighted, and which led her to
make long and romantic entries in the diary that was kept hidden beneath
her mattress. And so as she grew more hopeless, the aura of romance
surrounding him took on colors deeper and more varied and intense. She
had grown so pale that Mademoiselle Vernueil took to dosing her, and
Thérèse accused her abruptly of having fallen in love, a thing she
denied vaguely and with overtones of romantic mystery.
And then with the return to Pentlands (a return advised by her mother on
account of Jack’s health) the image dimmed a little in the belief that
even by the wildest flights of imagination there was no chance of her
seeing him again. It became a hopeless passion; she prepared herself to
forget him and, in the wisdom of her young mind, grow accustomed to the
idea of marrying one of the tame young men who were so much more
suitable and whom her family had always known. She had watched her
admirers carefully, weighing them always against the image of the young
man with red hair, dressed in the black and silver of the cuirassiers,
and beside that image they had seemed to her--even the blond,
good-looking Mannering boy--like little boys, rather naughty and not
half so old and wise as herself. She had reconciled herself secretly and
with gravity to the idea of making one of the matches common in her
world--a marriage determined by property and the fact that her fiancé
would be “the right sort of person.”
And so the whole affair had come to take on the color of a tragic
romance, to be guarded secretly. Perhaps when she was an old woman she
would tell the story to her grandchildren. She believed that whomever
she married, she would be thinking always of Jean de Cyon. It was one of
those half-comic illusions of youth in which there is more than a grain
of melancholy truth.
And then abruptly had come the news of his visit to Brook Cottage. She
still kept her secret, but not well enough to prevent her mother and
Sabine from suspecting it. She had betrayed herself first on the very
night of Jack’s death when she had said, with a sudden light in her eye,
“It’s Jean de Cyon.... I’d forgotten he was arriving to-night.” Olivia
had noticed the light because it was something which went on and on.
* * * * *
And at Brook Cottage young de Cyon, upset by the delay caused by the
funeral and the necessity of respecting the mourning at Pentlands, had
sulked and behaved in such a way that he would have been a nuisance to
any one save Sabine, who found amusement in the spectacle. Used to
rushing headlong toward anything he desired (as he had rushed into the
French army at seventeen and off to the Argentine nine months ago), he
turned ill-tempered and spent his days out of doors, rowing on the river
and bathing in the solitude of the great white beach. He quarreled with
Thérèse, whom he had known since she was a little girl, and tried to be
as civil as possible toward the amused Sabine.
She knew by now that he had not come to Durham through any great
interest in herself or Thérèse. She knew now how wise she had been (for
the purposes of her plan) to have included in her invitation to him the
line ... “Sybil Pentland lives on the next farm to us. You may remember
her. She lunched with us last Armistice Day.”
She saw that he rather fancied himself as a man of the world who was
being very clever in keeping his secret. He asked her about Sybil
Pentland in a casual way that was transparently artificial, and
consulted her on the lapse of time decently necessary before he broke in
upon the mourning at Pentlands, and had Miss Pentland shown any
admiration for the young men about Durham? If he had not been so
charming and impatient he would have bored Sabine to death.
The young man was afraid of only one thing ... that perhaps she had
changed in some way, that perhaps she was not in the reality as charming
as she had seemed to him in the long months of his absence. He was not
without experience (indeed, Sabine believed that he had gone to the
Argentine to escape from some Parisian complication) and he knew that
such calamitous disappointments _could_ happen. Perhaps when he came to
know her better the glamour would fade. Perhaps she did not remember him
at all. But she seemed to him, after months of romantic brooding, the
most desirable woman he had ever seen.
* * * * *
It was a new world in which he discovered himself, in some way a newer
and more different world than the vast grass-covered plains from which
he had just come. People about Durham, he learned, had a way of saying
that Boston and Durham were like England, but this he put down quietly
as a kind of snobbery, because Boston and Durham weren’t like England at
all, so far as he could see; in spots Boston and Durham seemed old, but
there wasn’t the same richness, the same glamour about them. They should
have been romantic and yet they were not; they were more, it seemed to
him, like the illustrations in a school history. They were dry ...
_sec_, he thought, considering the French word better in this case on
account of its sound.
And it wasn’t the likeness to England that he found interesting, but
rather the difference ... the bleak rawness of the countryside and the
sight of whole colonies of peoples as strange and foreign as the Czechs
and Poles providing a sort of alien background to the whole picture.
He had gone about the business of becoming acquainted with his own
country in a thorough, energetic fashion, and being a sensuous youth,
filled with a taste for colors and sounds and all the emanations of the
spectacle of life, he was acutely conscious of it.
To Sabine, he said, “You know the funny thing is that it seems to me
like coming home. It makes me feel that I belong in America ... not in
Durham, but in New York or some of those big roaring towns I’ve passed
through.”
He spoke, naturally enough, not at all like an American but in the
clipped English fashion, rather swallowing his words, and now and then
with a faint trace of French intonation. His voice was deeper and richer
than the New England voices, with their way of calling Charles Street
“Challs Street” and sacred Harvard ... “Havaad.”
It was the spectacle of New York which had fascinated him more than any
other because it surpassed all his dreams of it and all the descriptions
people had given him of its immense force and barbaric splendor and the
incredible variety of tongues and people. New York, Sabine told him with
a consciousness of uttering treason, _was_ America, far more than the
sort of life he would encounter in Durham.
As he talked to Sabine of New York, he would rise to that pitch of
excitement and enthusiasm which comes to people keenly alive. He even
confided in her that he had left Europe never to return there to live.
“It’s old country,” he said, “and if one has been brought up there, as
I’ve been, there’s no reason for going back there to live. In a way it’s
a dead world ... dead surely in comparison to the Americas. And it’s the
future that interests me ... not the past. I want to be where the most
is going on ... in the center of things.”
When he was not playing the piano wildly, or talking to Sabine, or
fussing about with Thérèse among the frogs and insects of the laboratory
she had rigged up on the glass-enclosed piazza, he was walking about the
garden in a state of suppressed excitement, turning over and over in his
young mind his own problem and the plans he had for adjusting himself in
this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of twenty-five,
was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young
Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin
Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled
with a reckless sense of adventure ... young men irresistible in such an
old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.
To ease his impatience he sought refuge in a furious physical activity,
rowing, swimming and driving with Sabine about the Durham countryside.
He could not walk far, on account of the trouble caused by his old
wound, but he got as far as O’Hara’s house, where he met the Irishman
and they became friends. O’Hara turned over to him a canoe and a
rowing-scull and told him that whenever his leg was better he might have
a horse from his stables.
One morning as he pulled his canoe up the muddy bank of the river after
his early exercise, he heard the sound of hoofs in the thick mud near at
hand and, turning, he saw Sybil Pentland on her mare Andromache coming
out of the thicket almost at his side.
It was a superb morning--cool for Durham in mid-August--and on the lazy
river the nympheas spread their waxy white blossoms in starlike clusters
against a carpet of green pads. It was a morning made for delights, with
the long rays of the rising sun striking to silver the dew-hung
spider-webs that bound together the tangled masses of wild-grape vines;
and young de Cyon, standing on the edge of the path, flushed with health
and the early morning exercise, his thick red hair all rumpled, was
overcome swiftly by a sense of tremendous physical well-being and
strength. A whole world lay before him waiting to be conquered; and into
it, out of the tangled thicket, had come Sybil Pentland, more charming
in the flesh than she had seemed to him even on the long starlit nights
when he lay awake on the pampas thinking of her.
For a second neither of them said anything. The girl, startled and
blushing a little, but touched, too, by a quiet sense of dignity, drew
in her mare; and Jean, looking up at her, said in a falsely casual way
(for his veins were throbbing with excitement), “Oh! Hello! You’re Miss
Pentland.”
“Yes.” But she looked suddenly disappointed, as if she _really_ believed
that he had almost forgotten her.
Standing clad only in trousers and a rowing-shirt, he looked down at his
costume and said, grinning, “I’m not dressed to receive visitors.”
Somehow this served to break the sense of restraint, and they fell into
conversation, exchanging a few banal remarks on the beauty of the
morning, and Jean, standing by Andromache, rubbing her nose with the
same tenderness he had shown toward Sybil’s dogs, looked at her out of
the candid blue eyes and said, “I should have come to see you sooner,
only I thought you mightn’t want to see me.”
A quivering note of warmth colored his voice.
“It would have made no difference,” she said. “And now you must come
often ... as often as you like. How long are you staying at Brook
Cottage?”
For a second he hesitated. “A fortnight ... perhaps. Perhaps ...
longer.”
And looking down at him, she thought, “I must make him stay. If I lose
him again now.... I must make him stay. I like him more than any one in
the world. I can’t lose him now.”
And she began to reason with herself that Fate was on her side, that
destiny had delivered him again into her hands. It was like a thing
ordained, and life with him would be exciting, a thrilling affair. The
quiet stubbornness, come down to her from Olivia, began to rise and take
possession of her. She was determined not to lose him.
They moved away up the river, still talking in a rather stiff fashion,
while Jean walked beside Andromache, limping a little. One banality
followed another as they groped toward each other, each proud and
fearful of showing his feelings, each timid and yet eager and impatient.
It was the excitement of being near to each other that made the
conversation itself take on a sense of importance. Neither of them
really knew what they were saying. In one sense they seemed strange and
exciting to each other, but in another they were not strange at all
because there lay between them that old feeling, which Sybil had
recognized in the garden of the Rue de Tilsitt, that they had known each
other always. There were no hesitations or doubts or suspicions.
The sky was brilliant; the scent of the mucky river and growing weeds
was overwhelming. There came to both of them a quickening of the senses,
a sort of heightened ecstasy, which shut out all the world. It was a
kind of enchantment, but different from the enchantment which enveloped
the dead house at Pentlands.
6
Each time that Olivia rose at dawn to ride out with Sybil and meet
O’Hara at the old gravel-pit, the simple excursion became more glamorous
to her. There was a youth in the contact with Sybil and the Irishman
which she had almost forgotten, a feeling of strength for which she had
long been hungering. It was, she found, a splendid way to begin the
day--in the cool of the morning, riding away over the drenched grass; it
made a freshening contrast to the rest of a day occupied largely by such
old people as her father-in-law and Anson (who was really an old man)
and the old woman in the north wing and by the persistent fluttering
attacks of Aunt Cassie. And Olivia, who was not without a secret vanity,
began to notice herself in the mirror ... that her eyes were brighter
and her skin was more clear. She saw that she was even perhaps
beautiful, and that the riding-habit became her in a romantic fashion.
She knew, too, riding across the fields between Sybil and O’Hara, that
he sometimes watched her with a curious bright light in his blue eyes.
He said nothing; he betrayed in no way the feeling behind all that
sudden, quiet declaration on the terrace of Brook Cottage. She began to
see that he was (as Sabine had discovered almost at once) a very clever
and dangerous man. It was not alone because of the strange, almost
physical, effect he had upon people--an effect which was almost as if
his presence took possession of you completely--but because he had
patience and knew how to be silent. If he had rushed in, recklessly and
clumsily, everything would have been precipitated and ruined at once.
There would have been a scene ending with his dismissal and Olivia,
perhaps, would have been free; but he had never touched her. It was
simply that he was always there, assuring her in some mysterious way
that his emotions had not changed, that he still wanted her more than
anything in all the world. And to a woman who was romantic by nature and
had never known any romance, it was a dangerous method.
There came a morning when, waiting by the gravel-pit, O’Hara saw that
there was only one rider coming toward him across the fields from
Pentlands. At first it occurred to him that it must be Sybil coming
alone, without her mother, and the old boredom and despair engulfed him
swiftly. It was only when the rider came nearer and he saw the white
star in the forehead of her horse that he knew it was Olivia herself.
That she came alone, knowing what he had already told her, he took as a
sign of immense importance.
This time he did not wait or ride slowly toward her. He galloped
impatiently as a boy across the wet fields to meet her.
She had the old look of radiance about her and a shyness, too, that made
her seem at first a trifle cool and withdrawn. She told him quietly,
“Sybil didn’t come this morning. She went out very early to fish with
Jean de Cyon. The mackerel are beginning to run in the open water off
the marshes.”
There was an odd, strained silence and O’Hara said, “He’s a nice boy ...
de Cyon.” And then, with a heroic effort to overcome the shyness which
she always managed to impose upon him, he said in a low voice, “But I’m
glad she didn’t come. I’ve wanted it to be like this all along.”
She did not say archly that he must not talk in this vein. It was a part
of her fascination that she was too honest and intelligent not to
dispense with such coquetry. He had had enough of coquetry from cheap
women and had wearied of it long ago. Besides, she had wanted it “like
this” herself and she knew that with O’Hara it was silly to pretend,
because sooner or later he always found her out. They were not
children, either of them. They both knew what they were doing, that it
was a dangerous, even a reckless thing; and yet the very sense of
excitement made the adventure as irresistible to the one as to the
other.
For a little time they rode in silence, watching the dark hoofs of the
horses as they sent up little showers of glittering dew from the
knee-deep grass and clover, and presently as they turned out of the
fields into the path that led into the birch woods, he laughed and said,
“A penny for your thoughts.”
Smiling, she replied, “I wouldn’t sell them for millions.”
“They must be very precious.”
“Perhaps ... precious to me, and to no one else.”
“Not to any one at all....”
“No.... I don’t think they’d interest any one. They’re not too
cheerful.”
At this he fell silent again, with an air of brooding and
disappointment. For a time she watched him, and presently she said, “You
mustn’t sulk on a morning like this.”
“I’m not sulking.... I was only ... thinking.”
She laughed. “A penny for your thoughts.”
He did not laugh. He spoke with a sudden intensity. “They, too, are
worth a million ... more than that ... only I’ll share them with you. I
wouldn’t share them with any one else.”
At the sound of his voice, a silly wave of happiness swept through
Olivia. She thought, “I’m being young and ridiculous and enjoying
myself.”
Aloud she said, “I haven’t a penny, but if you’ll trust me until
to-morrow?”
And then he turned to her abruptly, the shyness gone and in its place an
emotion close to irritation and anger. “Why buy them?” he asked. “You
know well enough what they are. You haven’t forgotten what I told you
on the terrace at Brook Cottage.... It’s grown more true every day ...
all of it.” When he saw that she had become suddenly grave, he said,
“And what about you?”
“You know how impossible it is.”
“Nothing is impossible ... nothing. Besides, I don’t mean the
difficulties. Those will come later.... I only mean your own feelings.”
“Can’t you see that I like you?... I must like you else I wouldn’t have
come alone this morning.”
“Like me,” he echoed with bitterness. “I’m not interested in having you
like me!” And when she made no reply, he added, almost savagely, “Why do
you keep me away from you? Why do you always put a little wall about
yourself?”
“Do I?” she asked, stupidly, and with a sense of pain.
“You are cool and remote even when you laugh.”
“I don’t want to be--I hate cold people.”
For a moment she caught a quick flash of the sudden bad temper which
sometimes betrayed him. “It’s because you’re so damned ladylike.
Sometimes I wish you were a servant or a scrub-woman.”
“And then I wouldn’t be the same--would I?”
He looked up quickly, as if to make a sudden retort, and then, checking
himself, rode on in silence. Stealing a glance at him, Olivia caught
against the wall of green a swift image of the dark, stubborn tanned
head--almost, she thought, like the head of a handsome bull--bent a
little, thoughtfully, almost sadly; and again a faint, weak feeling
attacked her--the same sensation that had overcome her on the night of
her son’s death when she sat regarding the back of Anson’s head and not
seeing it at all. She thought, “Why is it that this man--a
stranger--seems nearer to me than Anson has ever been? Why is it that I
talk to him in a way I never talked to Anson?” And a curious feeling of
pity seized her at the sight of the dark head. In a quick flash of
understanding she saw him as a little boy searching awkwardly for
something which he did not understand; she wanted to stroke the thick,
dark hair in a comforting fashion.
He was talking again. “You know nothing about me,” he was saying. “And
sometimes I think you ought to know it all.” Looking at her quickly he
asked, “Could you bear to hear it ... a little of it?”
She smiled at him, certain that in some mysterious, clairvoyant fashion
she had penetrated the very heart of his mood, and she thought, “How
sentimental I’m being ... how sickeningly sentimental!” Yet it was a
rich, luxuriant mood in which her whole being relaxed and bathed itself.
She thought again, “Why should I not enjoy this? I’ve been cautious all
my life.”
And seeing her smile, he began to talk, telling her, as they rode toward
the rising sun, the story of his humble origin and of those early bitter
days along India Wharf, and from time to time she said, “I understand.
My own childhood wasn’t happy,” or, “Go on, please. It fascinates me ...
more than you can imagine.”
So he went on, telling her the story of the long scar on his temple,
telling her as he had known he would, of his climb to success,
confessing everything, even the things of which he had come to be a
little ashamed, and betraying from time to time the bitterness which
afflicts those who have made their own way against great odds. The
shrewd, complex man became as naïve as a little boy; and she understood,
as he had known she would. It was miraculous how right he had been about
her.
Lost in this mood, they rode on and on as the day rose and grew warm,
enveloped all the while in the odor of the dark, rich, growing thicket
and the acrid smell of the tall marshferns, until Olivia, glancing at
her watch, said, “It is very late. I shall have missed the family
breakfast.” She meant really that Anson would have gone up to Boston by
now and that she was glad--only it was impossible to say a thing like
that.
* * * * *
At the gravel-pit, she bade him good-by, and turning her mare toward
Pentlands she felt the curious effect of his nearness slipping away from
her with each new step; it was as if the hot August morning were turning
cold. And when she came in sight of the big red brick house sitting so
solidly among the ancient elms, she thought, “I must never do this
again. I have been foolish.” And again, “Why should I not do it? Why
should I not be happy? They have no right to any claim upon me.”
But there was one claim, she knew; there was Sybil. She must not make a
fool of herself for the sake of Sybil. She must do nothing to interfere
with what had been taking place this very morning in the small
fishing-boat far out beyond the marshes somewhere near the spot where
Savina Pentland had been drowned. She knew well enough why Sybil had
chosen to go fishing instead of riding; it was so easy to look at the
girl and at young de Cyon and know what was happening there. She herself
had no right to stand in the way of this other thing which was so much
younger and fresher, so much more nearly perfect.
As she put her mare over the low wall by the stables she looked up and
chanced to see a familiar figure in rusty black standing in the garden,
as if she had been there all the while looking out over the meadows,
watching them. As she drew near, Aunt Cassie came forward with an
expression of anxiety on her face, saying in a thin, hushed voice, as if
she might be overheard, “I thought you’d never come back, Olivia dear.
I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Aware from the intense air of mystery that some new calamity had
occurred, Olivia replied, “I was riding with O’Hara. We went too far and
it was too hot to hurry the horses.”
“I know,” said Aunt Cassie. “I saw you.” (“Of course she would,” thought
Olivia. “Does anything ever escape her?”) “It’s about _her_. She’s been
violent again this morning and Miss Egan says you may be able to do
something. She keeps raving about something to do with the attic and
Sabine.”
“Yes, I know what it is. I’ll go right up.”
Higgins appeared, grinning and with a bright birdlike look in his sharp
eyes, as if he knew all that had been happening and wanted to say, “Ah,
you were out with O’Hara this morning ... alone.... Well, you can’t do
better, Ma’am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man
like that.”
As he took the bridle, he said, “That’s a fine animal Mr. O’Hara rides,
Ma’am. I wish we had him in our stables....”
She murmured something in reply and without even waiting for coffee
hastened up the dark stairs to the north wing. On the way past the row
of tall deep-set windows she caught a swift glimpse of Sabine, superbly
dressed and holding a bright yellow parasol over her head, moving
indolently up the long drive toward the house, and again she had a
sudden unaccountable sense of something melancholy, perhaps even tragic,
a little way off. It was one of those quick, inexplicable waves of
depression that sweeps over one like a shadow. She said to herself, “I’m
depressed now because an hour ago I was too happy.”
And immediately she thought, “But it was like Aunt Cassie to have such a
thought as that. I must take care or I’ll be getting to be a true
Pentland ... believing that if I’m happy a calamity is soon to follow.”
She had moments of late when it seemed to her that something in the air,
some power hidden in the old house itself, was changing her slowly,
imperceptibly, in spite of herself.
* * * * *
Miss Egan met her outside the door, with the fixed eternal smile which
to-day seemed to Olivia the sort of smile that the countenance of Fate
itself might wear.
“The old lady is more quiet,” she said. “Higgins helped me and we
managed to bind her in the bed so that she couldn’t harm herself. It’s
surprising how much strength she has in her poor thin body.” She
explained that old Mrs. Pentland kept screaming, “Sabine! Sabine!” for
Mrs. Callendar and that she kept insisting on being allowed to go into
the attic.
“It’s the old idea that she’s lost something up there,” said Miss Egan.
“But it’s probably only something she’s imagined.” Olivia was silent for
a moment. “I’ll go and search,” she said. “It might be there is
something and if I could find it, it would put an end to these spells.”
* * * * *
She found them easily, almost at once, now that there was daylight
streaming in at the windows of the cavernous attic. They lay stuffed
away beneath one of the great beams ... a small bundle of ancient
yellowed letters which had been once tied together with a bit of mauve
ribbon since torn in haste by some one who thrust them in this place of
concealment. They had been opened carelessly and in haste, for the
moldering paper was all cracked and torn along the edges. The ink,
violet once, had turned to a dirty shade of brown.
Standing among the scattered toys left by Jack and Sybil the last time
they had played house, Olivia held the letters one by one up to the
light. There were eleven in all and each one was addressed to Mrs. J.
Pentland, at Pentlands. Eight of them had been sent through the Boston
post-office and the other three bore no stamps of any kind, as if they
had been sent by messengers or in a bouquet or between the leaves of a
book. The handwriting was that of a man, large, impetuous, sprawling,
which showed a tendency to blur the letters together in a headlong,
impatient way.
She thought at once, “They are addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, which
means Mrs. Jared Pentland. Anson will be delighted, for these must be
the letters which passed between Savina Pentland and her cousin, Toby
Cane. Anson needed them to complete the book.”
And then it occurred to her that there was something strange about the
letters--in their having been hidden and perhaps found by the old lady
belowstairs and then hidden away a second time. Old Mrs. Pentland must
have found them there nearly forty years ago, when they still allowed
her to wander about the house. Perhaps it had been on one of those rainy
days when Anson and Sabine had come into the attic to play in this very
corner with these same old toys--the days when Sabine refused to pretend
that muddy water was claret. And now the old lady was remembering the
discovery after all these years because the return of Sabine and the
sound of her name had lighted some train of long-forgotten memories.
Seating herself on a broken, battered old trunk, she opened the first of
the letters reverently so as not to dislodge the bits of violet
sealing-wax that still clung to the edges, and almost at once she read
with a swift sense of shock:
_Carissima_,
_I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you
didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was
still there at Pentlands with you...._
She stopped reading. She understood it now.... The scamp Toby Cane had
been more than merely a cousin to Savina Pentland; he had been her lover
and that was why she had hidden the letters away beneath the beams of
the vast unfinished attic, intending perhaps to destroy them one day.
And then she had been drowned before there was time and the letters lay
in their hiding-place until John Pentland’s wife had discovered them one
day by chance, only to hide them again, forgetting in the poor shocked
mazes of her mind what they were or where they were hidden. They were
the letters which Anson had been searching for.
But she saw at once that Anson would never use the letters in his book,
for he would never bring into the open a scandal in the Pentland family,
even though it was a scandal which had come to an end, tragically,
nearly a century earlier and was now almost pure romance. She saw, of
course, that a love affair between so radiant a creature as Savina
Pentland and a scamp like Toby Cane would seem rather odd in a book
called “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” Perhaps
it was better not to speak of the letters at all. Anson would manage
somehow to destroy all the value there was in them; he would sacrifice
truth to the gods of Respectability and Pretense.
Thrusting the letters into her pocket, she descended the dark stairway,
and in the north wing Miss Egan met her to ask, almost with an air of
impatience, “I suppose you didn’t find anything?”
“No,” said Olivia quickly, “nothing which could possibly have interested
her.”
“It’s some queer idea she’s hatched up,” replied Miss Egan, and looked
at Olivia as if she doubted the truth of what she had said.
* * * * *
She did not go downstairs at once. Instead, she went to her own room and
after bathing, seated herself in the chaise longue by the open window
above the terrace, prepared to read the letters one by one. From below
there arose a murmur of voices, one metallic and hard, the other
nervous, thin, and high-pitched--Sabine’s and Aunt Cassie’s--as they sat
on the terrace in acid conversation, each trying to outstay the other.
Listening, Olivia decided that she was a little weary of them both this
morning; it was the first time it had ever occurred to her that in a
strange way there was a likeness between two women who seemed so
different. That curious pair, who hated each other so heartily, had the
same way of trying to pry into her life.
None of the letters bore any dates, so she fell to reading them in the
order in which they had been found, beginning with the one which read:
_Carissima_,
_I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you
didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was
still there at Pentlands with you...._
She read on:
_It’s the thought of his being there beside you, even taking
possession of you sometimes, that I can’t bear. I see him sitting
there in the drawing-room, looking at you--eating you with his eyes
and pretending all the while that he is above the lusts of the
flesh. The flesh! The flesh! You and I, dearest, know the glories
of the flesh. Sometimes I think I’m a coward not to kill him at
once._
_For God’s sake, get rid of him somehow to-night. I can’t pass
another evening alone in the dark gloomy cottage waiting in vain.
It is more than I can bear to sit there knowing that every minute,
every second, may bring the sound of your step. Be merciful to me.
Get rid of him somehow._
_I have not touched a drop of anything since I last saw you. Are
you satisfied with that?_
_I am sending this in a book by black Hannah. She will wait for an
answer._
Slowly, as she read on and on through the mazes of the impetuous,
passionate writing, the voices from the terrace below, the one raised
now and a little angry, the other still metallic, hard and indifferent,
grew more and more distant until presently she did not hear them at all
and in the place of the sound her senses received another
impression--that of a curious physical glow, stealing slowly through her
whole body. It was as if there lay in that faded brown writing a
smoldering fire that had never wholly died out and would never be
extinguished until the letters themselves had been burned into ashes.
Word by word, line by line, page by page, the whole tragic, passionate
legend came to recreate itself, until near the end she was able to see
the three principal actors in it with the reality of life, as if they
had never died at all but had gone on living in this old house, perhaps
in this very room where she sat ... the very room which once must have
belonged to Savina Pentland.
She saw the husband, that Jared Pentland of whom no portrait existed
because he would never spend money on such a luxury, as he must have
been in life--a sly man, shrewd and pious and avaricious save when the
strange dark passion for his wife made of him an unbalanced creature.
And Savina Pentland herself was there, as she looked out of the Ingres
portrait--dark, voluptuous, reckless, with her bad enticing eyes--a
woman who might easily be the ruin of a man like Jared Pentland. And
somehow she was able to get a clear and vivid picture of the writer of
those smoldering letters--a handsome scamp of a lover, dark like his
cousin Savina, and given to drinking and gambling. But most of all she
was aware of that direct, unashamed and burning passion that never had
its roots in this stony New England soil beyond the windows of
Pentlands. A man who frankly glorified the flesh! A waster! A seducer!
And yet a man capable of this magnificent fire which leaped up from the
yellow pages and warmed her through and through. It occurred to her then
for the first time that there was something heroic and noble and
beautiful in a passion so intense. For a moment she was even seized by
the feeling that reading these letters was a kind of desecration.
They revealed, too, how Jared Pentland had looked upon his beautiful
wife as a fine piece of property, an investment which gave him a sensual
satisfaction and also glorified his house and dinner-table. (What Sabine
called the “lower middle-class sense of property.”) He must have loved
her and hated her at once, in the way Higgins loved and hated the
handsome red mare. He must have been proud of her and yet hated her
because she possessed so completely the power of making a fool of him.
The whole story moved against a background of family ... the Pentland
family. There were constant references to cousins and uncles and aunts
and their suspicions and interference.
“It must have begun,” thought Olivia, “even in those days.”
Out of the letters she learned that the passion had begun in Rome when
Savina Pentland was sitting for her portrait by Ingres. Toby Cane had
been there with her and afterwards she had gone with him to his
lodgings; and when they had returned to the house at Durham (almost new
then and the biggest country seat in all New England) they had met in
the cottage--Brook Cottage, which still stood there within sight of
Olivia’s window--Brook Cottage, which after the drowning had been bought
by Sabine’s grandfather and then fallen into ruins and been restored
again by the too-bright, vulgar, resplendent touch of O’Hara. It was an
immensely complicated and intricate story which went back, back into the
past and seemed to touch them all here in Durham.
“The roots of life at Pentlands,” thought Olivia, “go down, down into
the past. There are no new branches, no young, vigorous shoots.”
She came at length to the last of the letters, which had buried in its
midst the terrible revealing lines--
_If you knew what delight it gives me to have you write that the
child is ours beyond any doubt, that there cannot be the slightest
doubt of it! The baby belongs to us ... to us alone! It has nothing
to do with him. I could not bear the idea of his thinking that the
child is his if it was not that it makes your position secure. The
thought tortures me but I am able to bear it because it leaves you
safe and above suspicion._
Slowly, thoughtfully, as if unable to believe her eyes, she reread the
lines through again, and then placed her hands against her head with a
gesture of feeling suddenly weak and out of her mind.
She tried to think clearly. “Savina Pentland never had but one child, so
far as I know ... never but one. And that must have been Toby Cane’s
child.”
There could be no doubt. It was all there, in writing. The child was
the child of Toby Cane and a woman who was born Savina Dalgedo. He was
not a Pentland and none of his descendants had been Pentlands ... not
one.
They were not Pentlands at all save as the descendants of Savina and her
lover had married among the Brahmins where Pentland blood was in every
family. They were not Pentlands by blood and yet they were Pentlands
beyond any question, in conduct, in point of view, in tradition. It
occurred to Olivia for the first time how immense and terrible a thing
was that environment, that air which held them all enchanted ... all the
cloud of prejudices and traditions and prides and small anxieties. It
was a world so set, so powerful, so iron-bound that it had made
Pentlands of people like Anson and Aunt Cassia, even like her
father-in-law. It made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at
all. She saw it now as an overwhelming, terrifying power that was a part
of the old house. It stood rooted in the very soil of all the landscape
that spread itself beyond her windows.
And in the midst of this realization she had a swift impulse to laugh,
hysterically, for the picture of Anson had come to her suddenly ...
Anson pouring his whole soul into that immense glorification to be known
as “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”
Slowly, as the first shock melted away a little, she began to believe
that the yellowed bits of paper were a sort of infernal machine, an
instrument with the power of shattering a whole world. What was she to
do with this thing--this curious symbol of a power that always won every
struggle in one way or another, directly as in the case of Savina and
her lover, or by taking its vengeance upon body or soul as it had done
in the case of Aunt Cassie’s poor, prying, scheming mind? And there was,
too, the dark story of Horace Pentland, and the madness of the old woman
in the north wing, and even those sudden terrible bouts of drinking
which made so fine a man as John Pentland into something very near to a
beast.
It was as if a light of blinding clarity had been turned upon all the
long procession of ancestors. She saw now that if “The Pentland Family
and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” was to have any value at all as truth
it must be rewritten in the light of the struggle between the forces
glorified by that drunken scamp Toby Cane and this other terrible force
which seemed to be all about her everywhere, pressing even herself
slowly into its own mold. It was an old struggle between those who chose
to find their pleasure in this world and those who looked for the vague
promise of a glorified future existence.
She could see Anson writing in his book, “In the present generation
(192-) there exists Cassandra Pentland Struthers (Mrs. Edward Cane
Struthers), a widow who has distinguished herself by her devotion to the
Episcopal Church and to charity and good works. She resides in winter in
Boston and in summer at her country house near Durham on the land
claimed from the wilderness by the first Pentland, distinguished founder
of the American family.”
Yes, Anson would write just those words in his book. He would describe
thus the old woman who sat belowstairs hoping all the while that Olivia
would descend bearing the news of some new tragedy ... that virginal old
woman who had ruined the whole life of her husband and kept poor
half-witted Miss Peavey a prisoner for nearly thirty years.
* * * * *
The murmur of voices died away presently and Olivia, looking out of the
window, saw that it was Aunt Cassie who had won this time. She was
standing in the garden looking down the drive with that malignant
expression which sometimes appeared on her face in moments when she
thought herself alone. Far down the shadow-speckled drive, the figure
of Sabine moved indolently away in the direction of Brook Cottage.
Sabine, too, belonged in a way to the family; she had grown up enveloped
in the powerful tradition which made Pentlands of people who were not
Pentlands at all. Perhaps (thought Olivia) the key to Sabine’s restless,
unhappy existence also lay in the same dark struggle. Perhaps if one
could penetrate deeply enough in the long family history one would find
there the reasons for Sabine’s hatred of this Durham world and the
reasons why she had returned to a people she disliked with all the
bitter, almost fanatic passion of her nature. There was in Sabine an
element of cold cruelty.
At the sight of Olivia coming down the steps into the garden, Aunt
Cassie turned and moved forward quickly with a look of expectancy,
asking, “And how is the poor thing?”
And at Olivia’s answer, “She’s quiet now ... sleeping. It’s all passed,”
the looked changed to one of disappointment.
She said, with an abysmal sigh, “Ah, she will go on forever. She’ll be
alive long after I’ve gone to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
“Invalids are like that,” replied Olivia, by way of saying something.
“They take such care of themselves.” And almost at once, she thought,
“Here I am playing the family game, pretending that she’s not mad but
only an invalid.”
She had no feeling of resentment against the busy old woman; indeed it
seemed to her at times that she had almost an affection for Aunt
Cassie--the sort of affection one has for an animal or a bit of
furniture which has been about almost as long as one can remember. And
at the moment the figure of Aunt Cassie, the distant sight of Sabine,
the bright garden full of flowers ... all these things seemed to her
melodramatic and unreal, for she was still living in the Pentlands of
Savina and Toby Cane. It was impossible to fix her attention on Aunt
Cassie and her flutterings.
The old lady was saying, “You all seem to have grown very fond of this
man O’Hara.”
(What was she driving at now?) Aloud, Olivia said, “Why not? He’s
agreeable, intelligent ... even distinguished in his way.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I’ve been discussing him with Sabine, and I’ve
come to the conclusion that I may have been wrong about him. She thinks
him a clever man with a great future.” There was a pause and she added
with an air of making a casual observation, “But what about his past? I
mean where does he come from.”
“I know all about it. He’s been telling me. That’s why I was late this
morning.”
For a time Aunt Cassie was silent, as if weighing some deep problem. At
last she said, “I was wondering about seeing too much of him. He has a
bad reputation with women.... At least, so I’m told.”
Olivia laughed. “After all, Aunt Cassie, I’m a grown woman. I can look
out for myself.”
“Yes.... I know.” She turned with a disarming smile of Christian
sweetness. “I don’t want you to think that I’m interfering, Olivia. It’s
the last thing I’d think of doing. But I was considering your own good.
It’s harmless enough, I’m sure. No one would ever think otherwise,
knowing you, my dear. But it’s what people will say. There was a scandal
I believe about eight years ago ... a road-house scandal!” She said this
with an air of great suffering, as if the words “road-house scandal”
seared her lips.
“I suppose so. Most men ... politicians, I mean ... have scandals
connected with their names. It’s part of the business, Aunt Cassie.”
And she kept thinking with amazement of the industry of the old
lady--that she should have taken the trouble of going far back into
O’Hara’s past to find some definite thing against him. She did not doubt
the ultimate truth of Aunt Cassie’s insinuation. Aunt Cassie did not lie
deliberately; there was always a grain of truth in her implications,
though sometimes the poor grain lay buried so deeply beneath
exaggerations that it was almost impossible to discover it. And a thing
like that might easily be true about O’Hara. With a man like him you
couldn’t expect women to play the rôle they played with a man like
Anson.
“It’s only on account of what people will say,” repeated Aunt Cassie.
“I’ve almost come to the conclusion that what people say doesn’t really
matter any longer....”
Aunt Cassie began suddenly to pick a bouquet from the border beside her.
“Oh, it’s not you I’m worrying about, Olivia dear. But we have to
consider others sometimes.... There’s Sybil and Anson, and even the very
name of Pentland. There’s never been any such suspicion attached to it
... ever.”
It was incredible (thought Olivia) that any one would make such a
statement, incredible anywhere else in the world. She wanted to ask,
“What about your brother and old Mrs. Soames?” And in view of those
letters that lay locked in her dressing-table....
At that moment lunch was announced by Peters’ appearance in the doorway.
Olivia turned to Aunt Cassie, “You’re staying, of course.”
“No, I must go. You weren’t expecting me.”
So Olivia began the ancient game, played for so many years, of pressing
Aunt Cassie to stay to lunch.
“It makes no difference,” she said, “only another plate.” And so on
through a whole list of arguments that she had memorized long ago. And
at last Aunt Cassie, with the air of having been pressed beyond her
endurance, yielded, and to Peters, who had also played the game for
years, Olivia said, “Lay another place for Mrs. Struthers.”
She had meant to stay all along. Lunching out saved both money and
trouble, for Miss Peavey ate no more than a bird, at least not openly;
and, besides, there were things she must find out at Pentlands, and
other things which she must plan. In truth, wild horses could not have
dragged her away.
As they entered the house, Aunt Cassie, carrying the bouquet she had
plucked, said casually, “I met the Mannering boy on the road this
morning and told him to come in to-night. I thought you wouldn’t mind.
He’s very fond of Sybil, you know.”
“No, of course not,” replied Olivia. “I don’t mind. But I’m afraid Sybil
isn’t very interested in him.”
CHAPTER VIII
1
The death of Horace Pentland was not an event to be kept quiet by so
simple a means as a funeral that was almost secret; news of it leaked
out and was carried here and there by ladies eager to rake up an old
Pentland scandal in vengeance upon Aunt Cassie, the community’s
principal disseminator of calamities. It even penetrated at last the
offices of the _Transcript_, which sent a request for an obituary of the
dead man, for he was, after all, a member of one of Boston’s proudest
families. And then, without warning, the ghost of Horace Pentland
reappeared suddenly in the most disconcerting of all quarters--Brook
Cottage.
The ghost accompanied Sabine up the long drive one hot morning while
Olivia sat listening to Aunt Cassie. Olivia noticed that Sabine
approached them with an unaccustomed briskness, that all trace of the
familiar indolence had vanished. As she reached the edge of the terrace,
she called out with a bright look in her eyes, “I have news ... of
Cousin Horace.”
She was enjoying the moment keenly, and the sight of her enjoyment must
have filled Aunt Cassie, who knew her so well, with uneasiness. She took
her own time about revealing the news, inquiring first after Aunt
Cassie’s health, and settling herself comfortably in one of the wicker
chairs. She was an artist in the business of tormenting the old lady and
she waited now to squeeze every drop of effect out of her announcement.
She was not to be hurried even by the expression which Aunt Cassie’s
face inevitably assumed at the mention of Horace Pentland--the
expression of one who finds himself in the vicinity of a bad smell and
is unable to escape.
At last, after lighting a cigarette and moving her chair out of the sun,
Sabine announced in a flat voice, “Cousin Horace has left everything he
possesses to me.”
A look of passionate relief swept Aunt Cassie’s face, a look which said,
“Pooh! Pooh! Is that all?” She laughed--it was almost a titter, colored
by mockery--and said, “Is that all? I imagine it doesn’t make you a
great heiress.”
(“Aunt Cassie,” thought Olivia, “ought not to have given Sabine such an
opportunity; she has said just what Sabine wanted her to say.”)
Sabine answered her: “But you’re wrong there, Aunt Cassie. It’s not
money that he’s left, but furniture ... furniture and bibelots ... and
it’s a wonderful collection. I’ve seen it myself when I visited him at
Mentone.”
“You ought never to have gone.... You certainly have lost all moral
sense, Sabine. You’ve forgotten all that I taught you as a little girl.”
Sabine ignored her. “You see, he worshiped such things, and he spent
twenty years of his life collecting them.”
“It seems improbable that they could be worth much ... with as little
money as Horace Pentland had ... only what we let him have to live on.”
Sabine smiled again, sardonically, perhaps because the tilt with Aunt
Cassie proved so successful. “You’re wrong again, Aunt Cassie....
They’re worth a great deal ... far more than he paid for them, because
there are things in his collection which you couldn’t buy elsewhere for
any amount of money. He took to trading pieces off until his collection
became nearly perfect.” She paused for a moment, allowing the knife to
rest in the wound. “It’s an immensely valuable collection. You see, I
know about it because I used to see Cousin Horace every winter when I
went to Rome. I knew more about him than any of you. He was a man of
perfect taste in such things. He really knew.”
Olivia sat all the while watching the scene with a quiet amusement. The
triumph on this occasion was clearly Sabine’s, and Sabine knew it. She
sat there enjoying every moment of it, watching Aunt Cassie writhe at
the thought of so valuable a heritage going out of the direct family, to
so remote and hostile a connection. It was clearly a disaster ranking in
importance with the historic loss of Savina Pentland’s parure of pearls
and emeralds at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It was property lost
forever that should have gone into the family fortune.
Sabine was opening the letter slowly, allowing the paper to crackle
ominously, as if she knew that every crackle ran painfully up and down
the spine of the old lady.
“It’s the invoice from the Custom House,” she said, lifting each of the
five long sheets separately. “Five pages long ... total value perhaps as
much as seventy-five thousand dollars.... Of course there’s not even any
duty to pay, as they’re all old things.”
Aunt Cassie started, as if seized by a sudden pain, and Sabine
continued, “He even left provision for shipping it ... all save four or
five big pieces which are being held at Mentone. There are eighteen
cases in all.”
She began to read the items one by one ... cabinets, commodes, chairs,
lusters, tables, pictures, bits of bronze, crystal and jade ... all the
long list of things which Horace Pentland had gathered with the loving
care of a connoisseur during the long years of his exile; and in the
midst of the reading, Aunt Cassie, unable any longer to control herself,
interrupted, saying, “It seems to me he was an ungrateful, disgusting
man. It ought to have gone to my dear brother, who supported him all
these years. I don’t see why he left it all to a remote cousin like
you.”
Sabine delved again into the envelope. “Wait,” she said. “He explains
that point himself ... in his own will.” She opened a copy of this
document and, searching for a moment, read, “To my cousin, Sabine
Callendar (Mrs. Cane Callendar), of--Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France, and
Newport, Rhode Island, I leave all my collections of furniture,
tapestries, bibelots, etc., in gratitude for her kindness to me over a
period of many years and in return for her faith and understanding at a
time when the rest of my family treated me as an outcast.”
Aunt Cassie was beside herself. “And how should he have been treated if
not as an outcast? He was an ungrateful, horrible wretch! It was
Pentland money which supported him all his miserable life.” She paused a
moment for breath. “I always told my dear brother that twenty-five
hundred a year was far more than Horace Pentland needed. And that is how
he has spent it, to insult the very people who were kind to him.”
Sabine put the papers back in the envelope and, looking up, said in her
hard, metallic voice: “Money’s not everything, as I told you once
before, Aunt Cassie. I’ve always said that the trouble with the
Pentlands ... with most of Boston, for that matter ... lies in the fact
that they were lower middle-class shopkeepers to begin with and they’ve
never lost any of the lower middle-class virtues ... especially about
money. They’ve been proud of living off the income of their incomes....
No, it wasn’t money that Horace Pentland wanted. It was a little decency
and kindness and intelligence. I fancy you got your money’s worth out of
the poor twenty-five hundred dollars you sent him every year. It was
worth a great deal more than that to keep the truth under a bushel.”
A long and painful silence followed this speech and Olivia, turning
toward Sabine, tried to reproach her with a glance for speaking thus to
the old lady. Aunt Cassie was being put to rout so pitifully, not only
by Sabine, but by Horace Pentland, who had taken his vengeance shrewdly,
long after he was dead, by striking at the Pentland sense of
possessions, of property.
The light of triumph glittered in the green eyes of Sabine. She was
paying back, bit by bit, the long account of her unhappy childhood; and
she had not yet finished.
Olivia, watching the conflict with disinterest, was swept suddenly by a
feeling of pity for the old lady. She broke the painful silence by
asking them both to stay for lunch, but this time Aunt Cassie refused,
in all sincerity, and Olivia did not press her, knowing that she could
not bear to face the ironic grin of Sabine until she had rested and
composed her face. Aunt Cassie seemed suddenly tired and old this
morning. The indefatigable, meddling spirit seemed to droop, no longer
flying proudly in the wind.
The queer, stuffy motor appeared suddenly on the drive, the back seat
filled by the rotund form of Miss Peavey surrounded by four yapping
Pekinese. The intricate veils which she wore on entering a motor
streamed behind her. Aunt Cassie rose and, kissing Olivia with
ostentation, turned to Sabine and went back again to the root of the
matter. “I always told my dear brother,” she repeated, “that twenty-five
hundred a year was far too much for Horace Pentland.”
The motor rattled off, and Sabine, laying the letter on the table beside
her, said, “Of course, I don’t want all this stuff of Cousin Horace’s,
but I’m determined it shan’t go to her. If she had it the poor old man
wouldn’t rest in his grave. Besides, she wouldn’t know what to do with
it in a house filled with tassels and antimacassars and souvenirs of
Uncle Ned. She’d only sell it and invest the money in invincible
securities.”
“She’s not well ... the poor old thing,” said Olivia. “She wouldn’t have
had the motor come for her if she’d been well. She’s pretended all her
life, and now she’s really ill--she’s terrified at the idea of death.
She can’t bear it.”
The old relentless, cruel smile lighted Sabine’s face. “No, now that the
time has come she hasn’t much faith in the Heaven she’s preached all her
life.” There was a brief silence and Sabine added grimly, “She will
certainly be a nuisance to Saint Peter.”
But there was only sadness in Olivia’s dark eyes, because she kept
thinking what a shallow, futile life Aunt Cassie’s had been. She had
turned her back upon life from the beginning, even with the husband whom
she married as a convenience. She kept thinking what a poor barren thing
that life had been; how little of richness, of memories, it held, now
that it was coming to an end.
Sabine was speaking again. “I know you’re thinking that I’m heartless,
but you don’t know how cruel she was to me ... what things she did to me
as a child.” Her voice softened a little, but in pity for herself and
not for Aunt Cassie. It was as if the ghost of the queer, unhappy,
red-haired little girl of her childhood had come suddenly to stand there
beside them where the ghost of Horace Pentland had stood a little while
before. The old ghosts were crowding about once more, even there on the
terrace in the hot August sunlight in the beauty of Olivia’s flowery
garden.
“She sent me into the world,” continued Sabine’s hard voice, “knowing
nothing but what was false, believing--the little I believed in
anything--in false gods, thinking that marriage was no more than a
business contract between two young people with fortunes. She called
ignorance by the name of innocence and quoted the Bible and that
milk-and-water philosopher Emerson ... ‘dear Mr. Emerson’ ... whenever
I asked her a direct, sensible question.... And all she accomplished was
to give me a hunger for facts--hard, unvarnished facts--pleasant or
unpleasant.”
A kind of hot passion entered the metallic voice, so that it took on an
unaccustomed warmth and beauty. “You don’t know how much she is
responsible for in my life. She ... and all the others like her ...
killed my chance of happiness, of satisfaction. She cost me my
husband.... What chance had I with a man who came from an older, wiser
world ... a world in which things were looked at squarely, and honestly
as truth ... a man who expected women to be women and not timid
icebergs? No, I don’t think I shall ever forgive her.” She paused for a
moment, thoughtfully, and then added, “And whatever she did, whatever
cruelties she practised, whatever nonsense she preached, was always done
in the name of duty and always ‘for your own good, my dear.’”
Then abruptly, with a bitter smile, her whole manner changed and took on
once more the old air of indolent, almost despairing, boredom. “I
couldn’t begin to tell you all, my dear.... It goes back too far. We’re
all rotten here ... not so much rotten as desiccated, for there was
never much blood in us to rot.... The roots go deep.... But I shan’t
bore you again with all this, I promise.”
Olivia, listening, wanted to say, “You don’t know how much blood there
is in the Pentlands.... You don’t know that they aren’t Pentlands at
all, but the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane.... But even that
hasn’t mattered.... The very air, the very earth of New England, has
changed them, dried them up.”
But she could not say it, for she knew that the story of those letters
must never fall into the hands of the unscrupulous Sabine.
“It doesn’t bore me,” said Olivia quietly. “It doesn’t bore me. I
understand it much too well.”
“In any case, we’ve spoiled enough of one fine day with it.” Sabine
lighted another cigarette and said with an abrupt change of tone, “About
this furniture, Olivia.... I don’t want it. I’ve a house full of such
things in Paris. I shouldn’t know what to do with it and I don’t think I
have the right to break it up and sell it. I want you to have it here at
Pentlands.... Horace Pentland would be satisfied if it went to you and
Cousin John. And it’ll be an excuse to clear out some of the Victorian
junk and some of the terrible early American stuff. Plenty of people
will buy the early American things. The best of them are only bad
imitations of the real things Horace Pentland collected, and you might
as well have the real ones.”
Olivia protested, but Sabine pushed the point, scarcely giving her time
to speak. “I want you to do it. It will be a kindness to me ... and
after all, Horace Pentland’s furniture ought to be here ... in
Pentlands. I’ll take one or two things for Thérèse, and the rest you
must keep, only nothing ... not so much as a medallion or a snuff-box
... is to go to Aunt Cassie. She hated him while he was alive. It would
be wrong for her to possess anything belonging to him after he is dead.
Besides,” she added, “a little new furniture would do a great deal
toward cheering up the house. It’s always been rather spare and cold. It
needs a little elegance and sense of luxury. There has never been any
splendor in the Pentland family--or in all New England, for that
matter.”
2
At almost the same moment that Olivia and Sabine entered the old house
to lunch, the figures of Sybil and Jean appeared against the horizon on
the rim of the great, bald hill crowned by the town burial-ground.
Escaped at length from the eye of the curious, persistent Thérèse, they
had come to the hill to eat their lunch in the open air. It was a
brilliantly clear day and the famous view lay spread out beneath them
like some vast map stretching away for a distance of nearly thirty
miles. The marshes appeared green and dark, crossed and recrossed by a
reticulation of tidal inlets frequented at nightfall by small boats
which brought in whisky and rum from the open sea. There were, distantly
visible, great piles of reddish rock rising from the endless white
ribbon of beach, and far out on the amethyst sea a pair of white-sailed
fishing-boats moved away in the direction of Gloucester. The white
sails, so near to each other, carried a warm friendliness in a universe
magnificent but also bleak and a little barren.
Coming over the rim of the hill the sudden revelation of the view halted
them for a moment. The day was hot, but here on the great hill, remote
from the damp, low-lying meadows, there was a fresh cool wind, almost a
gale, blowing in from the open sea. Sybil, taking off her hat, tossed it
to the ground and allowed the wind to blow her hair in a dark, tangled
mass about the serious young face; and at the same moment Jean, seized
by a sudden quick impulse, took her hand quietly in his. She did not
attempt to draw it away; she simply stood there quietly, as if conscious
only of the wild beauty of the landscape spread out below them and the
sense of the boy’s nearness to her. The old fear of depression and
loneliness seemed to have melted away from her; here on this high brown
hill, with all the world spread out beneath, it seemed to her that they
were completely alone ... the first and the last two people in all the
world. She was aware that a perfect thing had happened to her, so
perfect and so far beyond the realm of her most romantic imaginings
that it seemed scarcely real.
A flock of glistening white gulls, sweeping in from the sea, soared
toward them screaming wildly, and she said, “We’d better find a place to
eat.”
She had taken from the hands of Sabine the task of showing Jean this
little corner of his own country, and to-day they had come to see the
view from the burial-ground and read the moldering queer old
inscriptions on the tombstones. On entering the graveyard they came
almost at once to the little corner allotted long ago to immigrants with
the name of Pentland--a corner nearly filled now with neat rows of
graves. By the side of the latest two, still new and covered with fresh
sod, they halted, and she began in silence to separate the flowers she
had brought from her mother’s garden into two great bunches.
“This,” she said, pointing to the grave at her feet, “is his. The other
grave is Cousin Horace Pentland’s, whom I never saw. He died in
Mentone.... He was a first cousin of my grandfather.”
Jean helped her to fill the two vases with water and place the flowers
in them. When she had finished she stood up, with a sigh, very straight
and slender, saying, “I wish you had known him, Jean. You would have
liked him. He was always good-humored and he liked everything in the
world ... only he was never strong enough to do much but lie in bed or
sit on the terrace in the sun.”
The tears came quietly into her eyes, not at sorrow over the death of
her brother, but at the pathos of his poor, weak existence; and Jean,
moved by a quick sense of pity, took her hand again and this time kissed
it, in the quaint, dignified foreign way he had of doing such things.
They knew each other better now, far better than on the enchanted
morning by the edge of the river; and there were times, like this, when
to have spoken would have shattered the whole precious spell. There was
less of shyness between them than of awe at the thing which had happened
to them. At that moment he wanted to keep her forever thus, alone with
him, on this high barren hill, to protect her and feel her always there
at his side touching his arm gently. Here, in such a place, they would
be safe from all the unhappiness and the trouble which in a vague way he
knew was inevitably a part of living.
As they walked along the narrow path between the rows of chipped, worn
old stones they halted now and then to read some half-faded, crumbling
epitaph set forth in the vigorous, Biblical language of the first hardy
settlers--sometimes amused, sometimes saddened, by the quaint
sentiments. They passed rows of Sutherlands and Featherstones and Canes
and Mannerings, all turned to dust long ago, the good New England names
of that little corner of the world; and at length they came to a little
colony of graves with the name Milford cut into each stone. Here there
were no new monuments, for the family had disappeared long ago from the
Durham world.
In the midst of these Jean halted suddenly and, bending over one of the
stones, said, “Milford ... Milford.... That’s odd. I had a
great-grandfather named Milford who came from this part of the country.”
“There used to be a great many Milfords here, but there haven’t been any
since I can remember.”
“My great-grandfather was a preacher,” said Jean. “A Congregationalist.
He led all his congregation into the Middle West. They founded the town
my mother came from.”
For a moment Sybil was silent. “Was his name Josiah Milford?” she asked.
“Yes.... That was his name.”
“He came from Durham. And after he left, the church died slowly. It’s
still standing ... the big white church with the spire, on High Street.
It’s only a museum now.”
Jean laughed. “Then we’re not so far apart, after all. It’s almost as if
we were related.”
“Yes, because a Pentland did marry a Milford once, a long time ago ...
more than a hundred years, I suppose.”
The discovery made her happy in a vague way, perhaps because she knew it
made him seem less what they called an “outsider” at Pentlands. It
wouldn’t be so hard to say to her father, “I want to marry Jean de Cyon.
You know his ancestors came from Durham.” The name of Milford would make
an impression upon a man like her father, who made a religion of names;
but, then, Jean had not even asked her to marry him yet. For some reason
he had kept silent, saying nothing of marriage, and the silence clouded
her happiness at being near him.
“It’s odd,” said Jean, suddenly absorbed, in the way of men, over this
concrete business of ancestry. “Some of these Milfords must be direct
ancestors of mine and I’ve no idea which ones they are.”
“When we go down the hill,” she said, “I’ll take you to the
meeting-house and show you the tablet that records the departure of the
Reverend Josiah Milford and his congregation.”
She answered him almost without thinking what she was saying,
disappointed suddenly that the discovery should have broken in upon the
perfection of the mood that united them a little while before.
* * * * *
They found a grassy spot sheltered from the August sun by the leaves of
a stunted wild-cherry tree, all twisted by the sea winds, and there
Sybil seated herself to open their basket and spread the lunch--the
chicken, the crisp sandwiches, the fruit. The whole thing seemed an
adventure, as if they were alone on a desert island, and the small act
gave her a new kind of pleasure, a sort of primitive delight in serving
him while he stood looking down at her with a frank grin of admiration.
When she had finished he flung himself down at full length on the grass
beside her, to eat with the appetite of a great, healthy man given to
violent physical exercise. They ate almost in silence, saying very
little, looking out over the marshes and the sea. From time to time she
grew aware that he was watching her with a curious light in his blue
eyes, and when they had finished, he sat up cross-legged like a tailor,
to smoke; and presently, without looking at her he said, “A little while
ago, when we first came up the hill, you let me take your hand, and you
didn’t mind.”
“No,” said Sybil swiftly. She had begun to tremble a little, frightened
but wildly happy.
“Was it because ... because....” He groped for a moment for words and,
finding them, went quickly on, “because you feel as I do?”
She answered him in a whisper. “I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly
she felt an overwhelming desire to weep.
“I mean,” he said quietly, “that I feel we were made for each other ...
perfectly.”
“Yes ... Jean.”
He did not wait for her to finish. He rushed on, overwhelming her in a
quick burst of boyish passion. “I wish it wasn’t necessary to talk.
Words spoil everything.... They aren’t good enough.... No, you must take
me, Sybil. Sometimes I’m disagreeable and impatient and selfish ... but
you must take me. I’ll do my best to reform. I’ll make you happy....
I’ll do anything for you. And we can go away together anywhere in the
world ... always together, never alone ... just as we are here, on the
top of this hill.”
Without waiting for her to answer, he kissed her quickly, with a warm
tenderness that made her weep once more. She said over and over again,
“I’m so happy, Jean ... so happy.” And then, shamefacedly, “I must
confess something.... I was afraid you’d never come back, and I wanted
you always ... from the very beginning. I meant to have you from the
beginning ... from that first day in Paris.”
He lay with his head in her lap while she stroked the thick, red hair,
in silence. There in the graveyard, high above the sea, they lost
themselves in the illusion which overtakes such young lovers ... that
they had come already to the end of life ... that, instead of beginning,
it was already complete and perfect.
“I meant to have you always ... Jean. And after you came here and didn’t
come over to see me ... I decided to go after you ... for fear that
you’d escape again. I was shameless ... and a fraud, too.... That
morning by the river ... I didn’t come on you by accident. I knew you
were there all the while. I hid in the thicket and waited for you.”
“It wouldn’t have made the least difference. I meant to have you, too.”
A sudden impatient frown shadowed the young face. “You won’t let
anything change you, will you? Nothing that any one might say ...
nothing that might happen ... not anything?”
“Not anything,” she repeated. “Not anything in the world. Nothing could
change me.”
“And you wouldn’t mind going away from here with me?”
“No.... I’d like that. It’s what I have always wanted. I’d be glad to go
away.”
“Even to the Argentine?”
“Anywhere ... anywhere at all.”
“We can be married very soon ... before I leave ... and then we can go
to Paris to see my mother.” He sat up abruptly with an odd, troubled
look on his face. “She’s a wonderful woman, darling ... beautiful and
kind and charming.”
“I thought she was lovely ... that day in Paris ... the most fascinating
woman I’d ever seen, Jean dear.”
He seemed not to be listening to her. The wind was beginning to die away
with the heat of the afternoon, and far out on the amethyst sea the two
sailing ships lay becalmed and motionless. Even the leaves of the
twisted wild-cherry tree hung listlessly in the hot air. All the world
about them had turned still and breathless.
Turning, he took both her hands and looked at her. “There’s something I
must tell you ... Sybil ... something you may not like. But you mustn’t
let it make any difference.... In the end things like that don’t
matter.”
She interrupted him. “If it’s about women ... I don’t care. I know what
you are, Jean.... I’ll never know any better than I know now.... I don’t
care.”
“No ... what I want to tell you isn’t about women. It’s about my
mother.” He looked at her directly, piercingly. “You see ... my mother
and my father were never married. Good old Monsieur de Cyon only adopted
me.... I’ve no right to the name ... really. My name is really John
Shane.... They were never married, only it’s not the way it sounds.
She’s a great lady, my mother, and she refused to marry my father
because ... she says ... she says she found out that he wasn’t what she
thought him. He begged her to. He said it ruined his whole life ... but
she wouldn’t marry him ... not because she was weak, but because she was
strong. You’ll understand that when you come to know her.”
What he said would have shocked her more deeply if she had not been
caught in the swift passion of a rebellion against all the world about
her, all the prejudices and the misunderstandings that in her young
wisdom she knew would be ranged against herself and Jean. In this mood,
the mother of Jean became to her a sort of heroic symbol, a woman to be
admired.
She leaned toward him. “It doesn’t matter ... not at all, Jean ...
things like that don’t matter in the end.... All that matters is the
future....” She looked away from him and added in a low voice, “Besides,
what I have to tell you is much worse.” She pressed his hand savagely.
“You won’t let it change you? You’ll not give me up? Maybe you know it
already ... that I have a grandmother who is mad.... She’s been mad for
years ... almost all her life.”
He kissed her quickly. “No, it won’t matter.... Nothing could make me
think of giving you up ... nothing in the world.”
“I’m so happy, Jean ... and so peaceful ... as if you had saved me ...
as if you’d changed all my life. I’ve been frightened sometimes....”
But a sudden cloud had darkened the happiness ... the cloud that was
never absent from the house at Pentlands.
“You won’t let your father keep us apart, Sybil.... He doesn’t like
me.... It’s easy to see that.”
“No, I shan’t let him.” She halted abruptly. “What I am going to say may
sound dreadful.... I shouldn’t take my father’s word about anything. I
wouldn’t let him influence me. He’s spoiled his own life and my mother’s
too.... I feel sorry for my father.... He’s so blind ... and he fusses
so ... always about things which don’t matter.”
For a long time they sat in silence, Sybil with her eyes closed leaning
against him, when suddenly she heard him saying in a fierce whisper,
“That damned Thérèse!” and looking up she saw at the rim of the hill
beyond the decaying tombstones, the stocky figure of Thérèse, armed
with an insect-net and a knapsack full of lunch. She was standing with
her legs rather well apart, staring at them out of her queer gray eyes
with a mischievous, humorous expression. Behind her in a semicircle
stood a little army of dirty Polish children she had recruited to help
her collect bugs. They knew that she had followed them deliberately to
spy on them, and they knew that she would pretend blandly that she had
come upon them quite by accident.
“Shall we tell her?” asked Jean in a furious whisper.
“No ... never tell anything in Durham.”
The spell was broken now and Jean was angry. Rising, he shouted at
Thérèse, “Go and chase your old bugs and leave us in peace!” He knew
that, like her mother, Thérèse was watching them scientifically, as if
they were a pair of insects.
3
Anson Pentland was not by nature a malicious man or even a very
disagreeable one; his fussy activities on behalf of Morality arose from
no suppressed, twisted impulse of his own toward vice. Indeed, he was a
man of very few impulses--a rather stale, flat man who espoused the
cause of Morality because it belonged to his tradition and therefore
should be encouraged. He was, according to Sabine, something far worse
than an abandoned lecher; he was a bore, and a not very intelligent one,
who only saw straight along his own thin nose the tiny sector of the
universe in which circumstance had placed him. After forty-nine years of
staring, his gaze had turned myopic, and the very physical objects which
surrounded him--his house, his office, his table, his desk, his pen--had
come to be objects unique and glorified by their very presence as
utensils of a society the most elevated and perfect in existence.
Possessed of an immense and intricate _savoir-faire_ he lacked even a
suspicion of _savoir-vivre_, and so tradition, custom, convention, had
made of his life a shriveled affair, without initiative or
individuality, slipping along the narrow groove of ways set and
uninteresting. It was this, perhaps, which lay at the root of Sybil’s
pity for him.
Worshiping the habit of his stale world, he remained content and even
amiable so long as no attack was made upon his dignity--a sacred and
complicated affair which embraced his house, his friends, his clubs, his
ancestors, even to the small possessions allowed him by his father. Yet
this dignity was also a frail affair, easily subject to collapse ... a
sort of thin shell enclosing and protecting him. He guarded it with a
maidenly and implacable zeal. When all the threats and pleadings of Aunt
Cassie moved him to nothing more definite than an uneasy sort of
evasion, a threat at any of the things which came within the realm of
his dignity set loose an unsuspected, spiteful hatred.
He resented O’Hara because he knew perhaps that the Irishman regarded
him and his world with cynicism; and it was O’Hara and Irishmen like
him--Democrats (thought Anson) and therefore the scum of the earth--who
had broken down the perfect, chilled, set model of Boston life. Sabine
he hated for the same reasons; and from the very beginning he had taken
a dislike to “that young de Cyon” because the young man seemed to stand
entirely alone, independent of such dignities, without sign even of
respect for them. And he was, too, inextricably allied with O’Hara and
Sabine and the “outlandish Thérèse.”
Olivia suspected that he grew shrill and hysterical only at times when
he was tormented by a suspicion of their mockery. It was then that he
became unaccountable for what he said and did ... unaccountable as he
had been on that night after the ball. She understood that each day made
him more acutely sensitive of his dignity, for he was beginning to
interpret the smallest hint as an attack upon it.
Knowing these things, she had come to treat him always as a child,
humoring and wheedling him until in the end she achieved what she
desired, painlessly and surely. She treated him thus in the matter of
refurnishing the house. Knowing that he was absorbed in finishing the
final chapters of “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay
Colony,” she suggested that he move his table into the distant
“writing-room” where he would be less disturbed by family activities;
and Anson, believing that at last his wife was impressed by the
importance and dignity of his work, considered the suggestion an
excellent one. He even smiled and thanked her.
Then, after having consulted old John Pentland and finding that he
approved the plan, she began bit by bit to insinuate the furniture of
Horace Pentland into the house. Sabine came daily to watch the progress
of the change, to comment and admire and suggest changes. They found an
odd excitement in the emergence of one beautiful object after another
from its chrysalis of _emballage_; out of old rags and shavings there
appeared the most exquisite of tables and cabinets, bits of chinoiserie,
old books and engravings. One by one the ugly desk used by Mr. Lowell,
the monstrous lamp presented by Mr. Longfellow, the anemic water-colors
of Miss Maria Pentland ... all the furnishings of the museum were moved
into the vast old attic; until at length a new drawing-room emerged,
resplendent and beautiful, civilized and warm and even a little exotic,
dressed in all the treasures which Horace Pentland had spent his life in
gathering with passionate care. Quietly and almost without its being
noticed, the family skeleton took possession of the house, transforming
its whole character.
The change produced in Aunt Cassie a variety of confused and
conflicting emotions. It seemed sacrilege to her that the worn,
familiar, homely souvenirs of her father’s “dear friends” should be
relegated into the background, especially by the hand of Horace
Pentland; yet it was impossible for her to overlook the actual value of
the collection. She saw the objects less as things of rare beauty than
in terms of dollars and cents. And, as she had said, “Pentland things
ought to find a place in a Pentland house.” She suspected Sabine of
Machiavellian tactics and could not make up her mind whether Sabine and
Horace Pentland had not triumphed in the end over herself and “dear Mr.
Lowell” and “good, kind Mr. Longfellow.”
Anson, strangely enough, liked the change, with reservations. For a long
time he had been conscious of the fact that the drawing-room and much of
the rest of the house seemed shabby and worn, and so, unworthy of such
dignity as attached to the Pentland name.
He stood in the doorway of the drawing-room, surveying the
transformation, and remarked, “The effect seems good ... a little
flamboyant, perhaps, and undignified for such a house, but on the whole
... good ... quite good. I myself rather prefer the plain early American
furniture....”
To which Sabine replied abruptly, “But it makes hard sitting.”
Until now there had never been any music at Pentlands, for music was
regarded in the family as something you listened to in concert-halls,
dressed in your best clothes. Aunt Cassie, with Miss Peavey, had gone
regularly for years each Friday afternoon, to sit hatless with a scarf
over her head in Symphony Hall listening to “dear Colonel Higginson’s
orchestra” (which had fallen off so sadly since his death), but she had
never learned to distinguish one melody from another.... Music at
Pentlands had always been a cultural duty, an exercise something akin
to attending church. It made no more impression on Aunt Cassie than
those occasional trips to Europe when, taking her own world with her,
she stayed always at hotels where she would encounter friends from
Boston and never be subjected to the strain of barbaric, unsympathetic
faces and conversations.
And now, quite suddenly, music at Pentlands became something alive and
colorful and human. The tinny old square piano disappeared and in its
place there was a great new one bought by Olivia out of her own money.
In the evenings the house echoed to the sound of Chopin and Brahms,
Beethoven and Bach, and even such barbaric newcomers as Stravinsky and
Ravel. Old Mrs. Soames came, when she was well enough, to sit in the
most comfortable of the Regence chairs with old John Pentland at her
side, listening while the shadow of youth returned to her half-blind old
eyes. The sound of Jean’s music penetrated sometimes as far as the room
of the mad old woman in the north wing and into the writing-room, where
it disturbed Anson working on “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts
Bay Colony.”
And then one night, O’Hara came in after dinner, dressed in clothes cut
rather too obviously along radically fashionable lines. It was the first
time he had ever set foot on Pentland soil.
4
There were times now when Aunt Cassie told herself that Olivia’s strange
moods had vanished at last, leaving in their place the old docile,
pleasant Olivia who had always had a way of smoothing out the troubles
at Pentlands. The sudden perilous calm no longer settled over their
conversations; Aunt Cassie was no longer fearful of “speaking her mind,
frankly, for the good of all of them.” Olivia listened to her quietly,
and it is true that she was happier in one sense because life at
Pentlands seemed to be working itself out; but inwardly, she went her
own silent way, grieving in solitude because she dared not add the
burden of her grief to that of old John Pentland. Even Sabine, more
subtle in such things than Aunt Cassie, came to feel herself quietly
shut out from Olivia’s confidence.
Sybil, slipping from childhood into womanhood, no longer depended upon
her; she even grew withdrawn and secret about Jean, putting her mother
off with empty phrases where once she had confided everything. Behind
the pleasant, quiet exterior, it seemed to Olivia at times that she had
never been so completely, so superbly, alone. She began to see that at
Pentlands life came to arrange itself into a series of cubicles, each
occupied by a soul shut in from all the others. And she came, for the
first time in her life, to spend much time thinking of herself.
With the beginning of autumn she would be forty years old ... on the
verge of middle-age, a woman perhaps with a married daughter. Perhaps at
forty-two she would be a grandmother (it seemed likely with such a pair
as Sybil and young de Cyon) ... a grandmother at forty-two with her hair
still thick and black, her eyes bright, her face unwrinkled ... a woman
who at forty-two might pass for a woman ten years younger. A grandmother
was a grandmother, no matter how youthful she appeared. As a grandmother
she could not afford to make herself ridiculous.
She could perhaps persuade Sybil to wait a year or two and so put off
the evil day, yet such an idea was even more abhorrent to her. The very
panic which sometimes seized her at the thought of turning slowly into
an old woman lay also at the root of her refusal to delay Sybil’s
marriage. What was happening to Sybil had never happened to herself and
never could happen now; she was too old, too hard, even too cynical.
When one was young like Jean and Sybil, one had an endless store of
faith and hope. There was still a glow over all life, and one ought to
begin that way. Those first years--no matter what came afterward--would
be the most precious in all their existence; and looking about her, she
thought, “There are so few who ever have that chance, so few who can
build upon a foundation so solid.”
Sometimes there returned to her a sudden twinge of the ancient, shameful
jealousy which she had felt for Sybil’s youth that suffocating night on
the terrace overlooking the sea. (In an odd way, all the summer
unfolding itself slowly seemed to have grown out of that night.)
No, in the end she returned always to the same thought ... that she
would sacrifice everything to the perfection of this thing which existed
between Sybil and the impatient, red-haired young man.
When she was honest with herself, she knew that she would have had no
panic, no terror, save for O’Hara. Save for him she would have had no
fear of growing old, of seeing Sybil married and finding herself a
grandmother. She had prayed for all these things, even that Fate should
send Sybil just such a lover; and now that her prayer was answered there
were times when she wished wickedly that he had not come, or at least
not so promptly. When she was honest, the answer was always the same ...
that O’Hara had come to occupy the larger part of her interest in
existence.
In the most secret part of her soul, she no longer pretended that her
feeling for him was only one of friendship. She was in love with him.
She rose each morning joyfully to ride with him across the meadows,
pleased that Sybil came with them less and less frequently; and on the
days when he was kept in Boston a cloud seemed to darken all her
thoughts and actions. She talked to him of his future, his plans, the
progress of his campaign, as if already she were his wife or his
mistress. She played traitor to all her world whose fortunes rested on
the success and power of his political enemies. She came to depend upon
his quick sympathy. He had a Gaelic way of understanding her moods, her
sudden melancholy, that had never existed in the phlegmatic, insensitive
world of Pentlands.
She was honest with herself after the morning when, riding along the
damp, secret paths of the birch thicket, he halted his horse abruptly
and with a kind of anguish told her that he could no longer go on in the
way they were going.
He said, “What do you want me to do? I am good for nothing. I can think
of nothing but you ... all day and all night. I go to Boston and try to
work and all the while I’m thinking of you ... thinking what is to be
done. You must see what hell it is for me ... to be near you like this
and yet to be treated only as a friend.”
Abruptly, when she turned and saw the suffering in his eyes, she knew
there was no longer any doubt. She asked sadly, “What do you want me to
do? What can I do? You make me feel that I am being the cheapest,
silliest sort of woman.” And in a low voice she added, “I don’t mean to
be, Michael.... I love you, Michael.... Now I’ve told you. You are the
only man I’ve ever loved ... even the smallest bit.”
A kind of ecstatic joy took possession of him. He leaned over and kissed
her, his own tanned face dampened by her tears.
“I’m so happy,” she said, “and yet so sad....”
“If you love me ... then we can go our way ... we need not think of any
of the others.”
“Oh, it’s not so easy as that, my dear.” She had never before been so
conscious of his presence, of that strange sense of warmth and charm
which he seemed to impose on everything about him.
“I do have to think of the others,” she said. “Not my husband.... I
don’t think he even cares so long as the world knows nothing. But
there’s Sybil.... I can’t make a fool of myself on account of Sybil.”
She saw quickly that she had used the wrong phrase, that she had hurt
him; striking without intention at the fear which he sometimes had that
she thought him a common, vulgar Irish politician.
“Do you think that this thing between us ... might be called ‘making a
fool of yourself’?” he asked with a faint shade of bitterness.
“No ... you know me better than that.... You know I was thinking only of
myself ... as a middle-aged woman with a daughter ready to be married.”
“But she _will_ be married ... soon ... surely. Young de Cyon isn’t the
sort who waits.”
“Yes ... that’s true ... but even then.” She turned quickly. “What do
you want me to do?... Do you want me to be your mistress?”
“I want you for my own.... I want you to marry me.”
“Do you want me as much as that?”
“I want you as much as that.... I can’t bear the thought of sharing you
... of having you belong to any one else.”
“Oh ... I’ve belonged to no one for a great many years now ... not since
Jack was born.”
He went on, hurriedly, ardently. “It would change all my life. It would
give me some reason to go on.... Save for you.... I’d chuck everything
and go away.... I’m sick of it.”
“And you want me for my own sake ... not just because I’ll help your
career and give you an interest in life.”
“For your own sake ... nothing else, Olivia.”
“You see, I ask because I’ve thought a great deal about it. I’m older
than you, Michael. I seem young now.... But at forty.... I’ll be forty
in the autumn ... at forty being older makes a difference. It cuts short
our time.... It’s not as if we were in our twenties.... I ask you, too,
because you are a clever man and must see these things, too.”
“None of it makes any difference.” He looked so tragically in earnest,
there was such a light in his blue eyes, that her suspicions died. She
believed him.
“But we can’t marry ... ever,” she said, “so long as my husband is
alive. He’ll never divorce me nor let me divorce him. It’s one of his
passionate beliefs ... that divorce is a wicked thing. Besides, there
has never been a divorce in the Pentland family. There have been worse
things,” she said bitterly, “but never a divorce and Anson won’t be the
first to break any tradition.”
“Will you talk to him?”
“Just now, Michael, I think I’d do anything ... even that. But it will
do no good.” For a time they were both silent, caught in a profound
feeling of hopelessness, and presently she said, “Can you go on like
this for a little time ... until Sybil is gone?”
“We’re not twenty ... either of us. We can’t wait too long.”
“I can’t desert her yet. You don’t know how it is at Pentlands. I’ve got
to save her, even if I lose myself. I fancy they’ll be married before
winter ... even before autumn ... before he leaves. And then I shall be
free. I couldn’t ... I couldn’t be your mistress now, Michael ... with
Sybil still in there at Pentlands with me.... I may be quibbling.... I
may sound silly, but it does make a difference ... because perhaps I’ve
lived among them for too long.”
“You promise me that when she’s gone you’ll be free?”
“I promise you, Michael.... I’ve told you that I love you ... that
you’re the only man I’ve ever loved ... even the smallest bit.”
“Mrs. Callendar will help us.... She wants it.”
“Oh, Sabine....” She was startled. “You haven’t spoken to her? You
haven’t told her anything?”
“No.... But you don’t need to tell her such things. She has a way of
knowing.” After a moment he said, “Why, even Higgins wants it. He keeps
saying to me, in an offhand sort of way, as if what he said meant
nothing at all, ‘Mrs. Pentland is a fine woman, sir. I’ve known her for
years. Why, she’s even helped me out of scrapes. But it’s a pity she’s
shut up in that mausoleum with all those dead ones. She ought to have a
husband who’s a man. She’s married to a living corpse.’”
Olivia flushed. “He has no right to talk that way....”
“If you could hear him speak, you’d know that it’s not disrespect, but
because he worships you. He’d kiss the ground you walk over.” And
looking down, he added, “He says it’s a pity that a thoroughbred like
you is shut up at Pentlands. You mustn’t mind his way of saying it. He’s
something of a horse-breeder and so he sees such things in the light of
truth.”
She knew, then, what O’Hara perhaps had failed to understand--that
Higgins was touching the tragedy of her son, a son who should have been
strong and full of life, like Jean. And a wild idea occurred to
her--that she might still have a strong son, with O’Hara as the father,
a son who would be a Pentland heir but without the Pentland taint. She
might do what Savina Pentland had done. But she saw at once how absurd
such an idea was; Anson would know well enough that it was not _his_
son.
They rode on slowly and in silence while Olivia thought wearily round
and round the dark, tangled maze in which she found herself. There
seemed no way out of it. She was caught, shut in a prison, at the very
moment when her chance of happiness had come.
They came suddenly out of the thicket into the lane that led from Aunt
Cassie’s gazeboed house to Pentlands, and as they passed through the
gate they saw Aunt Cassie’s antiquated motor drawn up at the side of the
road. The old lady was nowhere to be seen, but at the sound of hoofs the
rotund form and silly face of Miss Peavey emerged from the bushes at one
side, her bulging arms filled with great bunches of some weed.
She greeted Olivia and nodded to O’Hara. “I’ve been gathering catnip for
my cats,” she called out. “It grows fine and thick there in the damp
ground by the spring.”
Olivia smiled ... a smile that gave her a kind of physical pain ... and
they rode on, conscious all the while that Miss Peavey’s china-blue eyes
were following them. She knew that Miss Peavey was too silly and
innocent to suspect anything, but she would, beyond all doubt, go
directly to Aunt Cassie with a detailed description of the encounter.
Very little happened in Miss Peavey’s life and such an encounter loomed
large. Aunt Cassie would draw from her all the tiny details, such as the
fact that Olivia looked as if she had been weeping.
Olivia turned to O’Hara. “There’s nothing malicious about poor Miss
Peavey,” she said, “but she’s a fool, which is far more dangerous.”
CHAPTER IX
1
As the month of August moved toward an end there was no longer any doubt
as to the “failing” of Aunt Cassie; it was confirmed by the very silence
with which she surrounded the state of her health. For forty years one
had discussed Aunt Cassie’s health as one discussed the weather--a thing
ever present in the consciousness of man about which one could do
nothing, and now Aunt Cassie ceased suddenly to speak of her health at
all. She even abandoned her habit of going about on foot and took to
making her round of calls in the rattling motor which she protested to
fear and loathe, and she came to lean more and more heavily upon the
robust Miss Peavey for companionship and support. Claiming a fear of
burglars, she had Miss Peavey’s bed moved into the room next to hers and
kept the door open between. She developed, Olivia discovered, an almost
morbid terror of being left alone.
And so the depression of another illness came to add its weight to the
burden of Jack’s death and the grief of John Pentland. The task of
battling the cloud of melancholy which hung over the old house grew more
and more heavy upon Olivia’s shoulders. Anson remained as usual
indifferent to any changes in the life about him, living really in the
past among all the sheaves of musty papers, a man not so much
cold-blooded as bloodless, for there was nothing active nor calculating
in his nature, but only a great inertia, a lack of all fire. And it was
impossible to turn to Sabine, who in an odd way seemed as cold and
detached as Anson; she appeared to stand at a little distance, waiting,
watching them all, even Olivia herself. And it was of course unthinkable
to cloud the happiness of Sybil by going to her for support.
There was at least O’Hara, who came more and more frequently to
Pentlands, now that the first visit had been made and the ice was
broken. Anson encountered him once in the hallway, coldly; and he had
become very friendly with old John Pentland. The two had a common
interest in horses and dogs and cattle, and O’Hara, born in the Boston
slums and knowing very little on any of these subjects, perhaps found
the old gentleman a valuable source of information. He told Olivia, “I
wouldn’t come to the house except for you. I can’t bear to think of you
there ... always alone ... always troubled.”
And in the evenings, while they played bridge or listened to Jean’s
music, she sometimes caught his eye, watching her with the old
admiration, telling her that he was ready to support her no matter what
happened.
A week after the encounter with Miss Peavey at the catnip-bed, Peters
came to Olivia’s room late in the afternoon to say, with a curious blend
of respect and confidence, “He’s ill again, Mrs. Pentland.”
She knew what Peters meant; it was a kind of code between them.... The
same words used so many times before.
She went quickly to the tall narrow library that smelled of dogs and
apples and woodsmoke, knowing well enough what she would find there; and
on opening the door she saw him at once, lying asleep in the big leather
chair. The faint odor of whisky--a smell which had come long since to
fill her always with a kind of horror--hung in the air, and on the
mahogany desk stood three bottles, each nearly emptied. He slept
quietly, one arm flung across his chest, the other hanging to the
floor, where the bony fingers rested limply against the Turkey-red
carpet. There was something childlike in the peace which enveloped him.
It seemed to Olivia that he was even free now of the troubles which long
ago had left their mark in the harsh, bitter lines of the old face. The
lines were gone, melted away somehow, drowned in the immense quiet of
this artificial death. It was only thus, perhaps, that he slept quietly,
untroubled by dreams. It was only thus that he ever escaped.
Standing in the doorway she watched him for a time, quietly, and then,
turning, she said to Peters, “Will you tell Higgins?” and entering the
door she closed the red-plush curtains, shutting out the late afternoon
sunlight.
Higgins came, as he had done so many times before, to lock the door and
sit there in the room, even sleeping on the worn leather divan, until
John Pentland, wakening slowly and looking about in a dazed way,
discovered his groom sitting in the same room, polishing a bridle or a
pair of riding-boots. The little man was never idle. Something deep
inside him demanded action: he must always be doing something. And so,
after these melancholy occasions, a new odor clung to the library for
days ... the fresh, clean, healthy odor of leather and harness-soap.
* * * * *
For two days Higgins stayed in the library, leaving it only for meals,
and for two days the old lady in the north wing went unvisited. Save for
this single room, there was no evidence of any change in the order of
life at Pentlands. Jean, in ignorance of what had happened, came in the
evenings to play. But Sabine knew; and Aunt Cassie, who never asked
questions concerning the mysterious absence of her brother lest she be
told the truth. Anson, as usual, noticed nothing. The only real change
lay in a sudden display of sulking and ill-temper on the part of Miss
Egan. The invincible nurse even quarreled with the cook, and was uncivil
to Olivia, who thought, “What next is to happen? I shall be forced to
look for a new nurse.”
On the evening of the third day, just after dinner, Higgins opened the
door and went in search of Olivia.
“The old gentleman is all right again,” he said. “He’s gone to bathe and
he’d like to see you in the library in half an hour.”
She found him there, seated by the big mahogany desk, bathed and
spotlessly neat in clean linen; but he looked very old and weary, and
beneath the tan of the leathery face there was a pallor which gave him a
yellowish look. It was his habit never to refer in any way to these sad
occasions, to behave always as if he had only been away for a day or two
and wanted to hear what had happened during his absence.
Looking up at her, he said gravely, “I wanted to speak to you, Olivia.
You weren’t busy, were you? I didn’t disturb you?”
“No,” she said. “There’s nothing.... Jean and Thérèse are here with
Sybil.... That’s all.”
“Sybil,” he repeated. “Sybil.... She’s very happy these days, isn’t
she?” Olivia nodded and even smiled a little, in a warm, understanding
way, so that he added, “Well, we mustn’t spoil her happiness. We mustn’t
allow anything to happen to it.”
A light came into the eyes of Olivia. “No; we mustn’t,” she repeated,
and then, “She’s a clever girl.... She knows what she wants from life,
and that’s the whole secret. Most people never know until it’s too
late.”
A silence followed this speech, so eloquent, so full of unsaid things,
that Olivia grew uneasy.
“I wanted to talk to you about ...” he hesitated for a moment, and she
saw that beneath the edge of the table his hands were clenched so
violently that the bony knuckles showed through the brown skin. “I
wanted to talk to you about a great many things.” He stirred and added
abruptly, “First of all, there’s my will.”
He opened the desk and took out a packet of papers, separating them
carefully into little piles before he spoke again. There was a weariness
in all his movements. “I’ve made some changes,” he said, “changes that
you ought to know about ... and there are one or two other things.” He
looked at her from under the fierce, shaggy eyebrows. “You see, I
haven’t long to live. I’ve no reason to expect to live forever and I
want to leave things in perfect order, as they have always been.”
To Olivia, sitting in silence, the conversation became suddenly painful.
With each word she felt a wall rising about her, shutting her in, while
the old man went on and on with an agonizing calmness, with an air of
being certain that his will would be obeyed in death as it had always
been in life.
“To begin with, you will all be left very rich ... very rich ...
something over six million dollars. And it’s solid money, Olivia ...
money not made by gambling, but money that’s been saved and multiplied
by careful living. For seventy-five years it’s been the tradition of the
family to live on the income of its income. We’ve managed to do it
somehow, and in the end we’re rich ... very rich.”
As he talked he kept fingering the papers nervously, placing them in
neat little piles, arranging and rearranging them.
“And, as you know, Olivia, the money has been kept in a way so that the
principal could never be spent. Sybil’s grandchildren will be able to
touch some of it ... that is, if you are unwise enough to leave it to
them that way.”
Olivia looked up suddenly. “But why me? What have I to do with it?”
“That’s what I’m coming to, Olivia dear.... It’s because I’m leaving
control of the whole fortune to you.”
Suddenly, fiercely, she wanted none of it. She had a quick, passionate
desire to seize all the neatly piled papers and burn them, to tear them
into small bits and fling them out of the window.
“I don’t want it!” she said. “Why should you leave it to me? I’m rich
myself. I don’t want it! I’m not a Pentland.... It’s not my money. I’ve
nothing to do with it.” In spite of herself, there was a note of
passionate resentment in her voice.
The shaggy brows raised faintly in a look of surprise.
“To whom, if not to you?” he asked.
After a moment, she said, “Why, Anson ... to Anson, I suppose.”
“You don’t really think that?”
“It’s his money ... Pentland money ... not mine. I’ve all the money I
need and more.”
“It’s yours, Olivia....” He looked at her sharply. “You’re more a
Pentland than Anson, in spite of blood ... in spite of name. You’re more
a Pentland than any of them. It’s your money by every right in spite of
anything you can do.”
(“But Anson isn’t a Pentland, nor you either,” thought Olivia.)
“It’s you who are dependable, who are careful, who are honorable,
Olivia. You’re the strong one. When I die, you’ll be the head of the
family.... Surely, you know that ... already.”
(“I,” thought Olivia, “I who have been so giddy, who am planning to
betray you all.... I am all this!”)
“If I left it to Anson, it would be wasted, lost on foolish ideas. He’s
no idea of business.... There’s a screw loose in Anson.... He’s a crank.
He’d be giving away this good money to missionaries and queer
committees ... societies for meddling in the affairs of people. That
wasn’t what this fortune was made for. No, I won’t have Pentland money
squandered like that....”
“And I,” asked Olivia. “How do you know what I will do with it?”
He smiled softly, affectionately. “I know what you’ll do with it,
because I know you, Olivia, my dear.... You’ll keep it safe and
intact.... You’re the Pentland of the family. You weren’t when you came
here, but you are now. I mean that you belong to the grand tradition of
Pentlands ... the old ones who hang out there in the hall. You’re the
only one left ... for Sybil is too young. She’s only a child ... yet.”
Olivia was silent, but beneath the silence there ran a torrent of cold,
rebellious thoughts. Being a Pentland, then, was not a matter of blood:
it was an idea, even an ideal. She thought fiercely, “I’m not a
Pentland. I’m alive. I am myself. I’ve not been absorbed into nothing.
All these years haven’t changed me so much. They haven’t made me into a
Pentland.” But for the sake of her affection, she could say none of
these things. She only said, “How do you know what I’ll do with it? How
do you know that I mightn’t squander it extravagantly--or--or even run
away, taking all that was free with me. No one could stop me--no one.”
He only repeated what he had said before, saying it more slowly this
time, as if to impress her. “I know what you’ll do with it, Olivia,
because I know you, Olivia dear--you’d never do anything foolish or
shameful--I know that--that’s why I trust you.”
And when she did not answer him, he asked, “You will accept it, won’t
you, Olivia? You’ll have the help of a good lawyer ... one of the best
... John Mannering. It will please me, Olivia, and it will let the world
know what I think of you, what you have been to me all these years ...
all that Anson has never been ... nor my own sister, Cassie.” He leaned
across the table, touching her white hand gently. “You will, Olivia?”
It was impossible to refuse, impossible even to protest any further,
impossible to say that in this very moment she wanted only to run away,
to escape, to leave them all forever, now that Sybil was safe. Looking
away, she said in a low voice, “Yes.”
It was impossible to desert him now ... an old, tired man. The bond
between them was too strong; it had existed for too long, since that
first day she had come to Pentlands as Anson’s bride and known that it
was the father and not the son whom she respected. In a way, he had
imposed upon her something of his own rugged, patriarchal strength. It
seemed to her that she had been caught when she meant most to escape;
and she was frightened, too, by the echoing thought that perhaps she had
become, after all, a Pentland ... hard, cautious, unadventurous and a
little bitter, one for whom there was no fire or glamour in life, one
who worshiped a harsh, changeable, invisible goddess called Duty. She
kept thinking of Sabine’s bitter remark about “the lower middle-class
virtues of the Pentlands” ... the lack of fire, the lack of splendor, of
gallantry. And yet this fierce old man _was_ gallant, in an odd
fashion.... Even Sabine knew that.
He was talking again. “It’s not only money that’s been left to you....
There’s Sybil, who’s still too young to be let free....”
“No,” said Olivia with a quiet stubbornness, “she’s not too young. She’s
to do as she pleases. I’ve tried to make her wiser than I was at her age
... perhaps wiser than I’ve ever been ... even now.”
“Perhaps you’re right, my dear. You have been so many times ... and
things aren’t the same as they were in my day ... certainly not with
young girls.”
He took up the papers again, fussing over them in a curious, nervous
way, very unlike his usual firm, unrelenting manner. She had a flash of
insight which told her that he was behaving thus because he wanted to
avoid looking at her. She hated confidences and she was afraid now that
he was about to tell her things she preferred never to hear. She hated
confidences and yet she seemed to be a person who attracted them always.
“And leaving Sybil out of it,” he continued, “there’s queer old Miss
Haddon in Durham whom, as you know, we’ve taken care of for years; and
there’s Cassie, who’s growing old and ill, I think. We can’t leave her
to half-witted Miss Peavey. I know my sister Cassie has been a burden to
you.... She’s been a burden to me, all my life....” He smiled grimly. “I
suppose you know that....” Then, after a pause, he said, “But most of
all, there’s my wife.”
His voice assumed a queer, unnatural quality, from which all feeling had
been removed. It became like the voices of deaf persons who never hear
the sounds they make.
“I can’t leave her alone,” he said. “Alone ... with no one to care for
her save a paid nurse. I couldn’t die and know that there’s no one to
think of her ... save that wretched, efficient Miss Egan ... a stranger.
No, Olivia ... there’s no one but you.... No one I can trust.” He looked
at her sharply, “You’ll promise me to keep her here always ... never to
let them send her away? You’ll promise?”
Again she was caught. “Of course,” she said. “Of course I’ll promise you
that.” What else was she to say?
“Because,” he added, looking away from her once more, “because I owe
her that ... even after I’m dead. I couldn’t rest if she were shut up
somewhere ... among strangers. You see ... once ... once....” He broke
off sharply, as if what he had been about to say was unbearable.
With Olivia the sense of uneasiness changed into actual terror. She
wanted to cry out, “Stop!... Don’t go on!” But some instinct told her
that he meant to go on and on to the very end, painfully, despite
anything she could do.
“It’s odd,” he was saying quite calmly, “but there seem to be only women
left ... no men ... for Anson is really an old woman.”
Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking
almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind
of machine, he went on, “And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we
needn’t think of him any longer.... But there’s Mrs. Soames....” He
coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as
if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great
agony. “There’s Mrs. Soames,” he repeated. “I know that you understand
about her, Olivia ... and I’m grateful to you for having been kind and
human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we’ve given
Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty
years ... but I don’t care about that. They’ve watched us ... they’ve
known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house ... the
very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world,
Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my
dear. They watch you ... they see everything you do. They almost know
what you think ... and when they don’t know, they make it up. That’s one
of the signs of a sick, decaying world ... that they get their living
vicariously ... by watching some one else live ... that they live always
in the past. That’s the only reason I ever felt sorry for Horace
Pentland ... the only reason that I had sympathy for him. It was cruel
that he should have been born in such a place.”
The bitterness ran like acid through all the speech, through the very
timbre of his voice. It burned in the fierce black eyes where the fire
was not yet dead. Olivia believed that she was seeing him now for the
first time, in his fulness, with nothing concealed. And as she listened,
the old cloud of mystery that had always hidden him from her began to
clear away like the fog lifting from the marshes in the early morning.
She saw him now as he really was ... a man fiercely masculine, bitter,
clear-headed, and more human than the rest of them, who had never before
betrayed himself even for an instant.
“But about Mrs. Soames.... If anything should happen to me, Olivia ...
if I should die first, I want you to be kind to her ... for my sake and
for hers. She’s been patient and good to me for so long.” The bitterness
seemed to flow away a little now, leaving only a kindling warmth in its
place. “She’s been good to me.... She’s always understood, Olivia, even
before you came here to help me. You and she, Olivia, have made life
worth living for me. She’s been patient ... more patient than you know.
Sometimes I must have made life for her a hell on earth ... but she’s
always been there, waiting, full of gentleness and sympathy. She’s been
ill most of the time you’ve known her ... old and ill. You can’t imagine
how beautiful she once was.”
“I know,” said Olivia softly. “I remember seeing her when I first came
to Pentlands ... and Sabine has told me.”
The name of Sabine appeared to rouse him suddenly. He sat up very
straight and said, “Don’t trust Sabine too far, Olivia. She belongs to
us, after all. She’s very like my sister Cassie ... more like her than
you can imagine. It’s why they hate each other so. She’s Cassie turned
inside out, as you might say. They’d both sacrifice everything for the
sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them.
They live ... vicariously.”
Olivia would have interrupted him, defending Sabine and telling of the
one real thing that had happened to her ... the tragic love for her
husband; she would have told him of all the abrupt, incoherent
confidences Sabine had made her; but the old man gave her no chance. It
seemed suddenly that he had become possessed, fiercely intent upon
pouring out to her all the dark things he had kept hidden for so long.
(She kept thinking, “Why must I know all these things? Why must I take
up the burden? Why was it that _I_ should find those letters which had
lain safe and hidden for so long?”)
He was talking again quietly, the bony fingers weaving in and out their
nervous futile pattern. “You see, Olivia.... You see, she takes drugs
now ... and there’s no use in trying to cure her. She’s old now, and it
doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if she were young with all her life
before her.”
Almost without thinking, Olivia answered, “I know that.”
He looked up quickly. “Know it?” he asked sharply. “How could you know
it?”
“Sabine told me.”
The head bowed again. “Oh, Sabine! Of course! She’s dangerous. She knows
far too much of the world. She’s known too many strange people.” And
then he repeated again what he had said months ago after the ball. “She
ought never to have come back here.”
Into the midst of the strange, disjointed conversation there came
presently the sound of music drifting toward them from the distant
drawing-room. John Pentland, who was a little deaf, did not hear it at
first, but after a little time he sat up, listening, and turning toward
her, asked, “Is that Sybil’s young man?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?”
“A very nice boy.”
After a silence he asked, “What’s the name of the thing he’s playing?”
Olivia could not help smiling. “It’s called _I’m in love again and the
spring is a-comin’_. Jean brought it back from Paris. A friend of his
wrote it ... but names don’t mean anything in music any more. No one
listens to the words.”
A shadow of amusement crossed his face. “Songs have queer names
nowadays.”
She would have escaped, then, going quietly away. She stirred and even
made a gesture toward leaving, but he raised his hand in the way he had,
making her feel that she must obey him as if she were a child.
“There are one or two more things you ought to know, Olivia ... things
that will help you to understand. Some one has to know them. Some
one....” He halted abruptly and again made a great effort to go on. The
veins stood out sharply on the bony head.
“It’s about _her_ chiefly,” he said, with the inevitable gesture toward
the north wing. “She wasn’t always that way. That’s what I want to
explain. You see ... we were married when we were both very young. It
was my father who wanted it. I was twenty and she was eighteen. My
father had known her family always. They were cousins of ours, in a way,
just as they were cousins of Sabine’s. He had gone to school with her
father and they belonged to the same club and she was an only child with
a prospect of coming into a great fortune. It’s an old story, you see,
but a rather common one in our world.... All these things counted, and
as for myself, I’d never had anything to do with women and I’d never
been in love with any one. I was very young. I think they saw it as a
perfect match ... made in the hard, prosperous Heaven of their dreams.
She was very pretty ... you can see even now that she must have been
very pretty.... She was sweet, too, and innocent.” He coughed, and
continued with a great effort. “She had ... she had a mind like a little
child’s. She knew nothing ... a flower of innocence,” he added with a
strange savagery.
And then, as if the effort were too much for him, he paused and sat
staring out of the window toward the sea. To Olivia it seemed that he
had slipped back across the years to the time when the poor old lady had
been young and perhaps curiously shy of his ardent wooing. A silence
settled again over the room, so profound that this time the faint,
distant roaring of the surf on the rocks became audible, and then again
the sound of Jean’s music breaking in upon them. He was playing another
tune ... not _I’m in love again_, but one called _Ukulele Lady_.
“I wish they’d stop that damned music!” said John Pentland.
“I’ll go,” began Olivia, rising.
“No ... don’t go. You mustn’t go ... not now.” He seemed anxious, almost
terrified, perhaps by the fear that if he did not tell now he would
never tell her the long story that he must tell to some one. “No, don’t
go ... not until I’ve finished, Olivia. I must finish.... I want you to
know why such things happened as happened here yesterday and the day
before in this room.... There’s no excuse, but what I have to tell you
may explain it ... a little.”
He rose and opening one of the bookcases, took out a bottle of whisky.
Looking at her, he said, “Don’t worry, Olivia, I shan’t repeat it. It’s
only that I’m feeling weak. It will never happen again ... what happened
yesterday ... never. I give you my word.”
He poured out a full glass and seated himself once more, drinking the
stuff slowly while he talked.
“So we were married, I thinking that I was in love with her, because I
knew nothing of such things ... nothing. It wasn’t really love, you
see.... Olivia, I’m going to tell you the truth ... everything ... all
of the truth. It wasn’t really love, you see. It was only that she was
the only woman I had ever approached in that way ... and I was a strong,
healthy young man.”
He began to speak more and more slowly, as if each word were thrust out
by an immense effort of will. “And she knew nothing ... nothing at all.
She was,” he said bitterly, “all that a young woman was supposed to be.
After the first night of the honeymoon, she was never quite the same
again ... never quite the same, Olivia. Do you know what that means? The
honeymoon ended in a kind of madness, a fixed obsession. She’d been
brought up to think of such things with a sacred horror and there was a
touch of madness in her family. She was never the same again,” he
repeated in a melancholy voice, “and when Anson was born she went quite
out of her head. She would not see me or speak to me. She fancied that I
had disgraced her forever ... and after that she could never be left
alone without some one to watch her. She never went out again in the
world....”
The voice died away into a hoarse whisper. The glass of whisky had been
emptied in a supreme effort to break through the shell which had closed
him in from all the world, from Olivia, whom he cherished, perhaps even
from Mrs. Soames, whom he had loved. In the distance the music still
continued, this time as an accompaniment to the hard, loud voice of
Thérèse singing, _I’m in love again and the spring is a-comin’_....
Thérèse, the dark, cynical, invincible Thérèse for whom life, from frogs
to men, held very few secrets.
“But the story doesn’t end there,” continued John Pentland weakly. “It
goes on ... because I came to know what being in love might be when I
met Mrs. Soames.... Only then,” he said sadly, as if he saw the tragedy
from far off as a thing which had little to do with him. “Only then,” he
repeated, “it was too late. After what I had done to _her_, it was too
late to fall in love. I couldn’t abandon her. It was impossible. It
ought never to have happened.” He straightened his tough old body and
added, “I’ve told you all this, Olivia, because I wanted you to
understand why sometimes I am....” He paused for a moment and then
plunged ahead, “why I am a beast as I was yesterday. There have been
times when it was the only way I could go on living.... And it harmed no
one. There aren’t many who ever knew about it.... I always hid myself.
There was never any spectacle.”
Slowly Olivia’s white hand stole across the polished surface of the desk
and touched the brown, bony one that lay there now, quietly, like a hawk
come to rest. She said nothing and yet the simple gesture carried an
eloquence of which no words were capable. It brought tears into the
burning eyes for the second time in the life of John Pentland. He had
wept only once before ... on the night of his grandson’s death. And they
were not, Olivia knew, tears of self-pity, for there was no self-pity in
the tough, rugged old body; they were tears at the spectacle of a
tragedy in which he happened by accident to be concerned.
“I wanted you to know, my dear Olivia ... that I have never been
unfaithful to _her_, not once in all the years since our
wedding-night.... I know the world will never believe it, but I wanted
you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who
matter to me ... and she _knows_ that it is true.”
And now that she knew the story was finished, she did not go away,
because she knew that he wanted her to stay, sitting there beside him
in silence, touching his hand. He was the sort of man--a man, she
thought, like Michael--who needed women about him.
After a long time, he turned suddenly and asked, “This boy of
Sybil’s--who is he? What is he like?”
“Sabine knows about him.”
“It’s that which makes me afraid.... He’s out of her world and I’m not
so sure that I like it. In Sabine’s world it doesn’t matter who a person
is or where he comes from as long as he’s clever and amusing.”
“I’ve watched him.... I’ve talked with him. I think him all that a girl
could ask ... a girl like Sybil, I mean.... I shouldn’t recommend him to
a silly girl ... he’d give such a wife a very bad time. Besides, I don’t
think we can do much about it. Sybil, I think, has decided.”
“Has he asked her to marry him? Has he spoken to you?”
“I don’t know whether he’s asked her. He hasn’t spoken to me. Young men
don’t bother about such things nowadays.”
“But Anson won’t like it. There’ll be trouble ... and Cassie, too.”
“Yes ... and still, if Sybil wants him, she’ll have him. I’ve tried to
teach her that in a case like this ... well,” she made a little gesture
with her white hand, “that she should let nothing make any difference.”
He sat thoughtfully for a long time, and at last, without looking up and
almost as if speaking to himself, he said, “There was once an elopement
in the family.... Jared and Savina Pentland were married that way.”
“But that wasn’t a happy match ... not too happy,” said Olivia; and
immediately she knew that she had come near to betraying herself. A word
or two more and he might have trapped her. She saw that it was
impossible to add the burden of the letters to these other secrets.
As it was, he looked at her sharply, saying, “No one knows that.... One
only knows that she was drowned.”
She saw well enough what he meant to tell her, by that vague hint
regarding Savina’s elopement; only now he was back once more in the
terrible shell; he was the mysterious, the false, John Pentland who
could only hint but never speak directly.
The music ceased altogether in the drawing-room, leaving only the vague,
distant, eternal pounding of the surf on the red rocks, and once the
distant echo of a footstep coming from the north wing. The old man said
presently, “So she wasn’t falling in love with this man O’Hara, after
all? There wasn’t any need for worry?”
“No, she never thought of him in that way, even for a moment.... To her
he seems an old man.... We mustn’t forget how young she is.”
“He’s not a bad sort,” replied the old man. “I’ve grown fond of him, and
Higgins thinks he’s a fine fellow. I’m inclined to trust Higgins. He has
an instinct about people ... the same as he has about the weather.” He
paused for a moment, and then continued, “Still, I think we’d best be
careful about him. He’s a clever Irishman on the make ... and such
gentlemen need watching. They’re usually thinking only of themselves.”
“Perhaps,” said Olivia, in a whisper. “Perhaps....”
The silence was broken by the whirring and banging of the clock in the
hall making ready to strike eleven. The evening had slipped away
quickly, veiled in a mist of unreality. At last the truth had been
spoken at Pentlands--the grim, unadorned, terrible truth; and Olivia,
who had hungered for it for so long, found herself shaken.
John Pentland rose slowly, painfully, for he had grown stiff and brittle
with the passing of the summer. “It’s eleven, Olivia. You’d better go to
bed and get some rest.”
2
She did not go to her own room, because it would have been impossible to
sleep, and she could not go to the drawing-room to face, in the mood
which held her captive, such young faces as those of Jean and Thérèse
and Sybil. At the moment she could not bear the thought of any enclosed
place, of a room or even a place covered by a roof which shut out the
open sky. She had need of the air and that healing sense of freedom and
oblivion which the sight of the marshes and the sea sometimes brought to
her. She wanted to breathe deeply the fresh salty atmosphere, to run, to
escape somewhere. Indeed, for a moment she succumbed to a sense of
panic, as she had done on the other hot night when O’Hara followed her
into the garden.
She went out across the terrace and, wandering aimlessly, found herself
presently moving beneath the trees in the direction of the marshes and
the sea. This last night of August was hot and clear save for the faint,
blue-white mist that always hung above the lower meadows. There had been
times in the past when the thought of crossing the lonely meadows, of
wandering the shadowed lanes in the darkness, had frightened her, but
to-night such an adventure seemed only restful and quiet, perhaps
because she believed that she could encounter there nothing more
terrible than the confidences of John Pentland. She was acutely aware,
as she had been on that other evening, of the breathless beauty of the
night, of the velvety shadows along the hedges and ditches, of the
brilliance of the stars, of the distant foaming white line of the sea
and the rich, fertile odor of the pastures and marshes.
And presently, when she had grown a little more calm, she tried to bring
some order out of the chaos that filled her body and spirit. It seemed
to her that all life had become hopelessly muddled and confused. She was
aware in some way, almost without knowing why, that the old man had
tricked her, turning her will easily to his own desires, changing all
the prospect of the future. She had known always that he was strong and
in his way invincible, but until to-night she had never known the full
greatness of his strength ... how relentless, even how unscrupulous he
could be; for he had been unscrupulous, unfair, in the way he had used
every weapon at hand ... every sentiment, every memory ... to achieve
his will. There had been no fierce struggle in the open; it was far more
subtle than that. He had subdued her without her knowing it, aided
perhaps by all that dark force which had the power of changing them all
... even the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane into “Pentlands.”
Thinking bitterly of what had passed, she came to see that his strength
rested upon the foundation of his virtue, his _rightness_. One could
say--indeed, one could believe it as one believed that the sun had risen
yesterday--that all his life had been tragically foolish and quixotic,
fantastically devoted to the hard, uncompromising ideal of what a
Pentland ought to be; and yet ... yet one knew that he had been right,
even perhaps heroic; one respected his uncompromising strength. He had
made a wreck of his own happiness and driven poor old Mrs. Soames to
seek peace in the Nirvana of drugs; and yet for her, he was the whole of
life: she lived only for him. This code of his was hard, cruel, inhuman,
sacrificing everything to its observance.... “Even,” thought Olivia, “to
sacrificing me along with himself. But I will not be sacrificed. I will
escape!”
And after a long time she began to see slowly what it was that lay at
the bottom of the iron power he had over people, the strength which none
of them had been able to resist. It was a simple thing ... simply that
he _believed_, passionately, relentlessly, as those first Puritans had
done.
The others all about her did not matter. Not one of them had any power
over her ... not Anson, nor Aunt Cassie, nor Sabine, nor Bishop
Smallwood. None of them played any part in the course of her life. They
did not matter. She had no fear of them; rather they seemed to her now
fussy and pitiful.
But John Pentland _believed_. It was that which made the difference.
* * * * *
Stumbling along half-blindly, she found herself presently at the bridge
where the lane from Pentlands crossed the river on its way to Brook
Cottage. Since she had been a little girl, the sight of water had
exerted a strange spell upon her ... the sight of a river, a lake, but
most of all the open sea; she had always been drawn toward these things
like a bit of iron toward a magnet; and now, finding herself at the
bridge, she halted, and stood looking over the stone parapet in the
shadow of the hawthorn-bushes that grew close to the water’s edge, down
on the dark, still pool below her. The water was black and in it the
bright little stars glittered like diamonds scattered over its surface.
The warm, rich odor of cattle filled the air, touched by the faint,
ghostly perfume of the last white nympheas that bordered the pool.
And while she stood there, bathed in the stillness of the dark solitude,
she began to understand a little what had really passed between them in
the room smelling of whisky and saddle-soap. She saw how the whole
tragedy of John Pentland and his life had been born of the stupidity,
the ignorance, the hypocrisy of others, and she saw, too, that he was
beyond all doubt the grandson of the Toby Cane who had written those
wild passionate letters glorifying the flesh; only John Pentland had
found himself caught in the prison of that other terrible thing--the
code in which he had been trained, in which he _believed_. She saw now
that it was not strange that he sought escape from reality by shutting
himself in and drinking himself into a stupor. He had been caught,
tragically, between those two powerful forces. He thought himself a
Pentland and all the while there burned in him the fire that lay in Toby
Cane’s letters and in the wanton look that was fixed forever in the
portrait of Savina Pentland. She kept seeing him as he said, “I have
never been unfaithful to _her_, not once in all the years since our
wedding-night.... I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs.
Soames are the only ones who matter to me ... and she _knows_ that it is
true.”
It seemed to her that this fidelity was a terrible, a wicked, thing.
And she came to understand that through all their talk together, the
thought, the idea, of Michael had been always present. It was almost as
if they had been speaking all the while about Michael and herself. A
dozen times the old man had touched upon it, vaguely but surely. She had
no doubts that Aunt Cassie had long since learned all there was to learn
from Miss Peavey of the encounter by the catnip-bed, and she was certain
that she had taken the information to her brother. Still, there was
nothing definite in anything Miss Peavey had seen, very little that was
even suspicious. And yet, as she looked back upon her talk with the old
man, it seemed to her that in a dozen ways, by words, by intonation, by
glances, he had implied that he knew the secret. Even in the end when,
cruelly, he had with an uncanny sureness touched the one fear, the one
suspicion that marred her love for Michael, by saying in the most casual
way, “Still, I think we’d better be careful of him. He’s a clever
Irishman on the make ... and such gentlemen need watching. They’re
usually thinking only of themselves.”
And then the most fantastic of all thoughts occurred to her ... that all
their talk together, even the painful, tragic confidence made with such
an heroic effort, was directed at herself. He had done all this--he had
emerged from his shell of reticence, he had humiliated his fierce
pride--all to force her to give up Michael, to force her to sacrifice
herself on the altar of that fantastic ideal in which he believed.
And she was afraid because he was so strong; because he had asked her to
do nothing that he himself had not done.
She would never know for certain. She saw that, after all, the John
Pentland she had left a little while before still remained an illusion,
veiled in mystery, unfathomable to her, perhaps forever. She had not
seen him at all.
* * * * *
Standing there on the bridge in the black shadow of the hawthorns, all
sense of time or space, of the world about her, faded out of existence,
so that she was aware of herself only as a creature who was suffering.
She thought, “Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I have become like them, and
that is why this struggle goes on and on. Perhaps if I were an ordinary
person ... sane and simple ... like Higgins ... there would be no
struggle and no doubts, no terror of simply _acting_, without
hesitation.”
She remembered what the old man had said of a world in which all action
had become paralyzed, where one was content simply to watch others act,
to live vicariously. The word “sane” had come to her quite naturally and
easily as the exact word to describe a state of mind opposed to that
which existed perpetually at Pentlands, and the thought terrified her
that perhaps this thing which one called “being a Pentland,” this state
of enchantment, was, after all, only a disease, a kind of madness that
paralyzed all power of action. One came to live in the past, to
acknowledge debts of honor and duty to people who had been dead for a
century and more.
“Once,” she thought, “I must have had the power of doing what I wanted
to do, what I thought right.”
And she thought again of what Sabine had said of New England as “a place
where thoughts became higher and fewer,” where every action became a
problem of moral conduct, an exercise in transcendentalism. It was
passing now, even from New England, though it still clung to the world
of Pentlands, along with the souvenirs of celebrated “dear friends.”
Even stowing the souvenirs away in the attic had changed nothing. It was
passing all about Pentlands; there was nothing of this sort in the New
England that belonged to O’Hara and Higgins and the Polish mill-workers
of Durham. The village itself had become a new and different place.
In the midst of this rebellion, she became aware, with that strange
acuteness which seemed to touch all her senses, that she was no longer
alone on the bridge in the midst of empty, mist-veiled meadows. She knew
suddenly and with a curious certainty that there were others somewhere
near her in the darkness, perhaps watching her, and she had for a moment
a wave of the quick, chilling fear which sometimes overtook her at
Pentlands at the times when she had a sense of figures surrounding her
who could neither be seen nor touched. And almost at once she
distinguished, emerging from the mist that blanketed the meadows, the
figures of two people, a man and a woman, walking very close to each
other, their arms entwined. For a moment she thought, “Am I really mad?
Am I seeing ghosts in reality?” The fantastic idea occurred to her that
the two figures were perhaps Savina Pentland and Toby Cane risen from
their lost grave in the sea to wander across the meadows and marshes of
Pentland. Moving through the drifting, starlit mist, they seemed vague
and indistinct and watery, like creatures come up out of the water. She
fancied them, all dripping and wet, emerging from the waves and crossing
the white rim of beach on their way toward the big old house....
The sight, strangely enough, filled her with no sense of horror, but
only with fascination.
And then, as they drew nearer, she recognized the man--something at
first vaguely familiar in the cocky, strutting walk. She knew the bandy
legs and was filled suddenly with a desire to laugh wildly and
hysterically. It was only the rabbitlike Higgins engaged in some new
conquest. Quietly she stepped farther into the shadow of the hawthorns
and the pair passed her, so closely that she might have reached out her
hand and touched them. It was only then that she recognized the woman.
It was no Polish girl from the village, this time. It was Miss Egan--the
starched, the efficient Miss Egan, whom Higgins had seduced. She was
leaning on him as they walked--a strange, broken, feminine Miss Egan
whom Olivia had never seen before.
At once she thought, “Old Mrs. Pentland has been left alone. Anything
might happen. I must hurry back to the house.” And she had a quick burst
of anger at the deceit of the nurse, followed by a flash of intuition
which seemed to clarify all that had been happening since the hot night
early in the summer when she had seen Higgins leaping the wall like a
goat to escape the glare of the motor-lights. The mysterious woman who
had disappeared over the wall that night _was_ Miss Egan. She had been
leaving the old woman alone night after night since then; it explained
the sudden impatience and bad temper of these last two days when Higgins
had been shut up with the old man.
She saw it all now--all that had happened in the past two months--in an
orderly procession of events. The old woman had escaped, leading the
way to Savina Pentland’s letters, because Miss Egan had deserted her
post to wander across the meadows at the call of that mysterious,
powerful force which seemed to take possession of the countryside at
nightfall. It was in the air again to-night, all about her ... in the
air, in the fields, the sound of the distant sea, the smell of cattle
and of ripening seeds ... as it had been on the night when Michael
followed her out into the garden.
In a way, the whole chain of events was the manifestation of the
disturbing force which had in the end revealed the secret of Savina’s
letters. It had mocked them, and now the secret weighed on Olivia as a
thing which she must tell some one, which she could no longer keep to
herself. It burned her, too, with the sense of possessing a terrible and
shameful weapon which she might use if pushed beyond endurance.
Slowly, after the two lovers had disappeared, she made her way back
again toward the old house, which loomed square and black against the
deep blue of the sky, and as she walked, her anger at Miss Egan’s
betrayal of trust seemed to melt mysteriously away. She would speak to
Miss Egan to-morrow, or the day after; in any case, the affair had been
going on all summer and no harm had come of it--no harm save the
discovery of Savina Pentland’s letters. She felt a sudden sympathy for
this starched, efficient woman whom she had always disliked; she saw
that Miss Egan’s life, after all, was a horrible thing--a procession of
days spent in the company of a mad old woman. It was, Olivia thought,
something like her own existence....
And it occurred to her at the same time that it would be difficult to
explain to so sharp-witted a creature as Miss Egan why she herself
should have been on the bridge at such an hour of the night. It was as
if everything, each little thought and action, became more and more
tangled and hopeless, more and more intricate and complicated with the
passing of each day. There was no way out save to cut the web boldly and
escape.
“No,” she thought, “I will not stay.... I will not sacrifice myself.
To-morrow I shall tell Michael that when Sybil is gone, I will do
whatever he wants me to do....”
When she reached the house she found it dark save for the light which
burned perpetually in the big hall illuminating faintly the rows of
portraits; and silent save for the creakings which afflicted it in the
stillness of the night.
3
She was wakened early, after having slept badly, with the news that
Michael had been kept in Boston the night before and would not be able
to ride with her as usual. When the maid had gone away she grew
depressed, for she had counted upon seeing him and coming to some
definite plan. For a moment she even experienced a vague jealousy, which
she put away at once as shameful. It was not, she told herself, that he
ever neglected her; it was only that he grew more and more occupied as
the autumn approached. It was not that there was any other woman
involved; she felt certain of him. And yet there remained that strange,
gnawing little suspicion, placed in her mind when John Pentland had
said, “He’s a clever Irishman on the make ... and such gentlemen need
watching.”
After all, she knew nothing of him save what he had chosen to tell her.
He was a free man, independent, a buccaneer, who could do as he chose in
life. Why should he ruin himself for her?
She rose at last, determined to ride alone, in the hope that the fresh
morning air and the exercise would put to rout this cloud of morbidity
which had kept possession of her from the moment she left John Pentland
in the library.
As she dressed, she thought, “Day after to-morrow I shall be forty years
old. Perhaps that’s the reason why I feel tired and morbid. Perhaps I’m
on the borderland of middle-age. But that can’t be. I am strong and well
and I look young, despite everything. I am tired because of what
happened last night.” And then it occurred to her that perhaps Mrs.
Soames had known these same thoughts again and again during her long
devotion to John Pentland. “No,” she told herself, “whatever happens I
shall never lead the life she has led. Anything is better than that ...
anything.”
It seemed strange to her to awaken and find that nothing was changed in
all the world about her. After what had happened the night before in the
library and on the dark meadows, there should have been some mark left
upon the life at Pentlands. The very house, the very landscape, should
have kept some record of what had happened; and yet everything was the
same. She experienced a faint shock of surprise to find the sun shining
brightly, to see Higgins in the stable-yard saddling her horse and
whistling all the while in an excess of high spirits, to hear the
distant barking of the beagles, and to see Sybil crossing the meadow
toward the river to meet Jean. Everything was the same, even Higgins,
whom she had mistaken for a ghost as he crossed the mist-hung meadows a
few hours earlier. It was as if there were two realities at
Pentlands--one, it might have been said, of the daylight and the other
of the darkness; as if one life--a secret, hidden one--lay beneath the
bright, pleasant surface of a world composed of green fields and trees,
the sound of barking dogs, the faint odor of coffee arising from the
kitchen, and the sound of a groom whistling while he saddled a
thoroughbred. It was a misfortune that chance had given her an insight
into both the bright, pleasant world and that other dark, nebulous one.
The others, save perhaps old John Pentland, saw only this bright, easy
life that had begun to stir all about her.
And she reflected that a stranger coming to Pentlands would find it a
pleasant, comfortable house, where the life was easy and even luxurious,
where all of them were protected by wealth. He would find them all
rather pleasant, normal, friendly people of a family respected and even
distinguished. He would say, “Here is a world that is solid and
comfortable and sound.”
Yes, it would appear thus to a stranger, so it might be that the dark,
fearful world existed only in her imagination. Perhaps she herself was
ill, a little unbalanced and morbid ... perhaps a little touched like
the old woman in the north wing.
Still, she thought, most houses, most families, must have such double
lives--one which the world saw and one which remained hidden.
As she pulled on her boots she heard the voice of Higgins, noisy and
cheerful, exchanging amorous jests with the new Irish kitchen-maid,
marking her already for his own.
* * * * *
She rode listlessly, allowing the mare to lead through the birch thicket
over the cool dark paths which she and Michael always followed. The
morning air did not change her spirits. There was something sad in
riding alone through the long green tunnel.
When at last she came out on the opposite side by the patch of catnip
where they had encountered Miss Peavey, she saw a Ford drawn up by the
side of the road and a man standing beside it, smoking a cigar and
regarding the engine as if he were in trouble. She saw no more than that
and would have passed him without troubling to look a second time, when
she heard herself being addressed.
“You’re Mrs. Pentland, aren’t you?”
She drew in the mare. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Pentland.”
He was a little man, dressed rather too neatly in a suit of checkered
stuff, with a high, stiff white collar which appeared to be strangling
him. He wore nose-glasses and his face had a look of having been highly
polished. As she turned, he took off his straw hat and with a great show
of manners came forward, bowing and smiling cordially.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that I’m right. I hoped I might meet
you here. It’s a great pleasure to know you, Mrs. Pentland. My name is
Gavin.... I’m by way of being a friend of Michael O’Hara.”
“Oh!” said Olivia. “How do you do?”
“You’re not in a great hurry, I hope?” he asked. “I’d like to have a
word or two with you.”
“No, I’m not in a great hurry.”
It was impossible to imagine what this fussy little man, standing in the
middle of the road, bowing and smiling, could have to say to her.
Still holding his hat in his hand, he tossed away the end of his cigar
and said, “It’s about a very delicate matter, Mrs. Pentland. It has to
do with Mr. O’Hara’s campaign. I suppose you know about that. You’re a
friend of his, I believe?”
“Why, yes,” she said coldly. “We ride together.”
He coughed and, clearly ill at ease, set off on a tangent from the main
subject. “You see, I’m a great friend of his. In fact, we grew up
together ... lived in the same ward and fought together as boys. You
mightn’t think it to see us together ... because he’s such a clever one.
He’s made for big things and I’m not.... I’m ... I’m just plain John
Gavin. But we’re friends, all the same, just the same as ever ... just
as if he wasn’t a big man. That’s one thing about Michael. He never goes
back on his old friends, no matter how great he gets to be.”
A light of adoration shone in the blue eyes of the little man. It was,
Olivia thought, as if he were speaking of God; only clearly he thought
of Michael O’Hara as greater than God. If Michael affected men like
this, it was easy to see why he was so successful.
The little man kept interrupting himself with apologies. “I shan’t keep
you long, Mrs. Pentland ... only a moment. You see I thought it was
better if I saw you here instead of coming to the house.” Suddenly
screwing up his shiny face, he became intensely serious. “It’s like
this, Mrs. Pentland.... I know you’re a good friend of his and you wish
him well. You want to see him get elected ... even though you people out
here don’t hold much with the Democratic party.”
“Yes,” said Olivia. “That’s true.”
“Well,” he continued with a visible effort, “Michael’s a good friend of
mine. I’m sort of a bodyguard to him. Of course, I never come out here,
I don’t belong in this world.... I’d feel sort of funny out here.”
(Olivia found herself feeling respect for the little man. He was so
simple and so honest and he so obviously worshiped Michael.)
“You see ... I know all about Michael. I’ve been through a great deal
with him ... and he’s not himself just now. There’s something wrong. He
ain’t interested in his work. He acts as if he’d be willing to chuck his
whole career overboard ... and I can’t let him do that. None of his
friends ... can’t let him do it. We can’t get him to take a proper
interest in his affairs. Usually, he manages everything ... better than
any one else could.” He became suddenly confidential, closing one eye.
“D’you know what I think is the matter? I’ve been watching him and I’ve
got an idea.”
He waited until Olivia said, “No ... I haven’t the least idea.”
Cocking his head on one side and speaking with the air of having made a
great discovery, he said, “Well, I think there’s a woman mixed up in
it.”
She felt the blood mounting to her head, in spite of anything she could
do. When she was able to speak, she asked, “Yes, and what am I to do?”
He moved a little nearer, still with the same air of confiding in her.
“Well, this is my idea. Now, you’re a friend of his ... you’ll
understand. You see, the trouble is that it’s some woman here in Durham
... some swell, you see, like yourself. That’s what makes it hard. He’s
had women before, but they were women out of the ward and it didn’t make
much difference. But this is different. He’s all upset, and....” He
hesitated for a moment. “Well, I don’t like to say a thing like this
about Michael, but I think his head is turned a little. That’s a mean
thing to say, but then we’re all human, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “Yes ... in the end, we’re all human ... even
swells like me.” There was a twinkle of humor in her eye which for a
moment disconcerted the little man.
“Well,” he went on, “he’s all upset about her and he’s no good for
anything. Now, what I thought was this ... that you could find out who
this woman is and go to her and persuade her to lay off him for a time
... to go away some place ... at least until the campaign is over. It’d
make a difference. D’you see?”
He looked at her boldly, as if what he had been saying was absolutely
honest and direct, as if he really had not the faintest idea who this
woman was, and beneath a sense of anger, Olivia was amused at the crude
tact which had evolved this trick.
“There’s not much that I can do,” she said. “It’s a preposterous idea
... but I’ll do what I can. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything. It lies
with Mr. O’Hara, after all.”
“You see, Mrs. Pentland, if it ever got to be a scandal, it’d be the end
of him. A woman out of the ward doesn’t matter so much, but a woman out
here would be different. She’d get a lot of publicity from the sassiety
editors and all.... That’s what’s dangerous. He’d have the whole church
against him on the grounds of immorality.”
While he was speaking, a strange idea occurred to Olivia--that much of
what he said sounded like a strange echo of Aunt Cassie’s methods of
argument.
The horse had grown impatient and was pawing the road and tossing his
head; and Olivia was angry now, genuinely angry, so that she waited for
a time before speaking, lest she should betray herself and spoil all
this little game of pretense which Mr. Gavin had built up to keep
himself in countenance. At last she said, “I’ll do what I can, but it’s
a ridiculous thing you’re asking of me.”
The little man grinned. “I’ve been a long time in politics, Ma’am, and
I’ve seen funnier things than this....” He put on his hat, as if to
signal that he had said all he wanted to say. “But there’s one thing I’d
like to ask ... and that’s that you never let Michael know that I spoke
to you about this.”
“Why should I promise ... anything?”
He moved nearer and said in a low voice, “You know Michael very well,
Mrs. Pentland.... You know Michael very well, and you know that he’s got
a bad, quick temper. If he found out that we were meddling in his
affairs, he might do anything. He might chuck the whole business and
clear out altogether. He’s never been like this about a woman before.
He’d do it just now.... That’s the way he’s feeling. You don’t want to
see him ruin himself any more than I do ... a clever man like Michael.
Why, he might be president one of these days. He can do anything he sets
his will to, Ma’am, but he is, as they say, temperamental just now.”
“I’ll not tell him,” said Olivia quietly. “And I’ll do what I can to
help you. And now I must go.” She felt suddenly friendly toward Mr.
Gavin, perhaps because what he had been telling her was exactly what she
wanted most at that moment to hear. She leaned down from her horse and
held out her hand, saying, “Good-morning, Mr. Gavin.”
Mr. Gavin removed his hat once more, revealing his round, bald, shiny
head. “Good-morning, Mrs. Pentland.”
As she rode off, the little man remained standing in the middle of the
road looking after her until she had disappeared. His eye glowed with
the light of admiration, but as Olivia turned from the road into the
meadows, he frowned and swore aloud. Until now he hadn’t understood how
a good politician like Michael could lose his head over any woman. But
he had an idea that he could trust this woman to do what she had
promised. There was a look about her ... a look which made her seem
different from most women; perhaps it was this look which had made a
fool of Michael, who usually kept women in their proper places.
Grinning and shaking his head, he got into the Ford, started it with a
great uproar, and set off in the direction of Boston. After he had gone
a little way he halted again and got out, for in his agitation he had
forgotten to close the hood.
* * * * *
From the moment she turned and rode away from Mr. Gavin, Olivia gave
herself over to action. She saw that there was need of more than mere
static truth to bring order out of the hazy chaos at Pentlands; there
must be action as well. And she was angry now, really angry, even at Mr.
Gavin for his impertinence, and at the unknown person who had been his
informant. The strange idea that Aunt Cassie or Anson was somehow
responsible still remained; tactics such as these were completely
sympathetic to them--to go thus in Machiavellian fashion to a man like
Gavin instead of coming to her. By using Mr. Gavin there would be no
scene, no definite unpleasantness to disturb the enchantment of
Pentlands. They could go on pretending that nothing was wrong, that
nothing had happened.
But stronger than her anger was the fear that in some way they might use
the same tactics to spoil the happiness of Sybil. They would, she was
certain, sacrifice everything to their belief in their own rightness.
She found Jean at the house when she returned, and, closing the door of
the drawing-room, she said to him, “Jean, I want to talk to you for a
moment ... alone.”
He said at once, “I know, Mrs. Pentland. It’s about Sybil.”
There was a little echo of humor in his voice that touched and disarmed
her as it always did. It struck her that he was still young enough to be
confident that everything in life would go exactly as he wished it....
“Yes,” she said, “that was it.” They sat on two of Horace Pentland’s
chairs and she continued. “I don’t believe in meddling, Jean, only now
there are circumstances ... reasons....” She made a little gesture. “I
thought that if really ... really....”
He interrupted her quickly. “I do, Mrs. Pentland. We’ve talked it all
over, Sybil and I ... and we’re agreed. We love each other. We’re going
to be married.”
Watching the young, ardent face, she thought, “It’s a nice face in
which there is nothing mean or nasty. The lips aren’t thin and tight
like Anson’s, nor the skin sickly and pallid the way Anson’s has always
been. There’s life in it, and force and charm. It’s the face of a man
who would be good to a woman ... a man not in the least cold-blooded.”
“Do you love her ... really?” she asked.
“I ... I.... It’s a thing I can’t answer because there aren’t words to
describe it.”
“Because ... well ... Jean, it’s no ordinary case of a mother and a
daughter. It’s much more than that. It means more to me than my own
happiness, my own life ... because, well, because Sybil is like a part
of myself. I want her to be happy. It’s not just a simple case of two
young people marrying. It’s much more than that.” There was a silence,
and she asked, “How do you love her?”
He sat forward on the edge of his chair, all eagerness. “Why ...” he
began, stammering a little, “I couldn’t think of living without her.
It’s different from anything I ever imagined. Why ... we’ve planned
everything ... all our lives. If ever I lost her, it wouldn’t matter
what happened to me afterwards.” He grinned and added, “But you see ...
people have said all that before. There aren’t any words to explain ...
to make it seem as different from anything else as it seems to me.”
“But you’re going to take her away?”
“Yes ... she wants to go where I go.”
(“They are young,” thought Olivia. “They’ve never once thought of any
one else ... myself or Sybil’s grandfather.”)
Aloud she said, “That’s right, Jean.... I want you to take her away ...
no matter what happens, you must take her away....” (“And then I won’t
even have Sybil.”)
“We’re going to my ranch in the Argentine.”
“That’s right.... I think Sybil would like that.” She sighed, in spite
of herself, vaguely envious of these two. “But you’re so young. How can
you know for certain.”
A shadow crossed his face and he said, “I’m twenty-five, Mrs. Pentland
... but that’s not the only thing.... I was brought up, you see, among
the French ... like a Frenchman. That makes a difference.” He hesitated,
frowning for a moment. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell.... You mightn’t
understand. I know how things are in this part of the world.... You see,
I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural ...
something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I’ve been in love
before, casually ... the way young Frenchmen are ... but in earnest,
too, because a Frenchman can’t help surrounding a thing like that with
sentiment and romance. He can’t help it. If it were just ... just
something shameful and nasty, he couldn’t endure it. They don’t have
affairs in cold blood ... the way I’ve heard men talk about such things
since I’ve come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look
at the thing in the light they do. It’s different here.... I see the
difference more every day.”
He was talking earnestly, passionately, and when he paused for a moment
she remained silent, unwilling to interrupt him until he had finished.
“What I’m trying to say is difficult, Mrs. Pentland. It’s simply this
... that I’m twenty-five, but I’ve had experience with life. Don’t
laugh! Don’t think I’m just a college boy trying to make you think I’m a
roué. Only what I say is true. I know about such things ... and I’m glad
because it makes me all the more certain that Sybil is the only woman in
the world for me ... the one for whom I’d sacrifice everything. And I’ll
know better how to make her happy, to be gentle with her ... to
understand her. I’ve learned now, and it’s a thing which needs learning
... the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it.
They make a fine, wonderful thing of love.” He turned away with a sudden
air of sadness. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you all this.... I’ve
told Sybil. She understands.”
“No,” said Olivia, “I think you’re right ... perhaps.” She kept thinking
of the long tragic story of John Pentland, and of Anson, who had always
been ashamed of love and treated it as something distasteful. To them it
had been a dark, strange thing always touched by shame. She kept
thinking, despite anything she could do, of Anson’s clumsy, artificial
attempts at love-making, and she was swept suddenly by shame for him.
Anson, so proud and supercilious, was a poor thing, inferior even to his
own groom.
“But why,” she asked, “didn’t you tell me about Sybil sooner? Every one
has seen it, but you never spoke to me.”
For a moment he did not answer her. An expression of pain clouded the
blue eyes, and then, looking at her directly, he said, “It’s not easy to
explain why. I was afraid to come to you for fear you mightn’t
understand, and the longer I’ve been here, the longer I’ve put it off
because ... well, because here in Durham, ancestors, family, all that,
seems to be the beginning and end of everything. It seems always to be a
question of who one’s family is. There is only the past and no future at
all. And, you see, in a way ... I haven’t any family.” He shrugged his
big shoulders and repeated, “In a way, I haven’t any family at all. You
see, my mother was never married to my father.... I’ve no blood-right to
the name of de Cyon. I’m ... I’m ... well, just a bastard, and it seemed
hopeless for me even to talk to a Pentland about Sybil.”
He saw that she was startled, disturbed, but he could not have known
that the look in her eyes had very little to do with shock at what he
had told her; rather she was thinking what a weapon the knowledge would
be in the hands of Anson and Aunt Cassie and even John Pentland himself.
He was talking again with the same passionate earnestness.
“I shan’t let it make any difference, so long as Sybil will have me,
but, you see, it’s very hard to explain, because it isn’t the way it
seems. I want you to understand that my mother is a wonderful woman....
I wouldn’t bother to explain, to say anything ... except to Sybil and to
you.”
“Sabine has told me about her.”
“Mrs. Callendar has known her for a long time.... They’re great
friends,” said Jean. “She understands.”
“But she never told me ... that. You mean that she’s known it all
along?”
“It’s not an easy thing to tell ... especially here in Durham, and I
fancy she thought it might make trouble for me ... after she saw what
had happened to Sybil and me.”
He went on quickly, telling her what he had told Sybil of his mother’s
story, trying to make her understand what he understood, and Sabine and
even his stepfather, the distinguished old de Cyon ... trying to explain
a thing which he himself knew was not to be explained. He told her that
his mother had refused to marry her lover, “because in his life outside
... the life which had nothing to do with her ... she discovered that
there were things she couldn’t support. She saw that it was better not
to marry him ... better for herself and for him and, most of all, for
me.... He did things for the sake of success--mean, dishonorable
things--which she couldn’t forgive ... and so she wouldn’t marry him.
And now, looking back, I think she was right. It made no great
difference in her life. She lived abroad ... as a widow, and very few
people--not more than two or three--ever knew the truth. _He_ never told
because, being a politician, he was afraid of such a scandal. She
didn’t want me to be brought up under such an influence, and I think she
was right. He’s gone on doing things that were mean and dishonorable....
He’s still doing them to-day. You see he’s a politician ... a rather
cheap one. He’s a Senator now and he hasn’t changed. I could tell you
his name.... I suppose some people would think him a distinguished man
... only I promised her never to tell it. He thinks that I’m dead.... He
came to her once and asked to see me, to have a hand in my education and
my future. There were things, he said, that he could do for me in
America ... and she told him simply that I was dead ... that I was
killed in the war.” He finished in a sudden burst of enthusiasm, his
face alight with affection. “But you must know her really to understand
what I’ve been saying. Knowing her, you understand everything, because
she’s one of the great people ... the strong people of the world. You
see, it’s one of the things which it is impossible to explain--to you or
even to Sybil--impossible to explain to the others. One must know her.”
If she had had any doubts or fears, she knew now that it was too late to
act; she saw that it was impossible to change the wills of two such
lovers as Jean and Sybil. In a way, she came to understand the story of
Jean’s mother more from watching him than by listening to his long
explanation. There must be in her that same determination and ardor that
was in her son ... a thing in its way irresistible. And yet it was
difficult; she was afraid, somehow, of this unexpected thing, perhaps
because it seemed vaguely like the taint of Savina Pentland.
She said, “If no one knows this, there is no reason to tell it here. It
would only make unhappiness for all concerned. It is your business alone
... and Sybil’s. The others have no right to interfere, even to know;
but they will try, Jean ... unless ... unless you both do what you want
... quickly. Sometimes I think they might do anything.”
“You mean ...” he began impatiently.
Olivia fell back upon that vague hint which John Pentland had dropped to
her the night before. She said, “There was once an elopement in the
Pentland family.”
“You wouldn’t mind that?” he asked eagerly. “You wouldn’t be hurt ... if
we did it that way?”
“I shouldn’t know anything about it,” said Olivia quietly, “until it was
too late to do anything.”
“It’s funny,” he said; “we’d thought of that. We’ve talked of it, only
Sybil was afraid you’d want to have a big wedding and all that....”
“No, I think it would be better not to have any wedding at all ...
especially under the circumstances.”
“Mrs. Callendar suggested it as the best way out.... She offered to lend
us her motor,” he said eagerly.
“You discussed it with her and yet you didn’t speak to me?”
“Well, you see, she’s different ... she and Thérèse.... They don’t
belong here in Durham. Besides, she spoke of it first. She knew what was
going on. She always knows. I almost think that she planned the whole
thing long ago.”
Olivia, looking out of the window, saw entering the long drive the
antiquated motor with Aunt Cassie, Miss Peavey, her flying veils and her
Pekinese.
“Mrs. Struthers is coming ...” she said. “We mustn’t make her
suspicious. And you’d best tell me nothing of your plans and then ... I
shan’t be able to interfere even if I wanted to. I might change my mind
... one never knows.”
He stood up and, coming over to her, took her hand and kissed it.
“There’s nothing to say, Mrs. Pentland ... except that you’ll be glad
for what you’ve done. You needn’t worry about Sybil.... I shall make her
happy.... I think I know how.”
He left her, hurrying away past the ancestors in the long hall to find
Sybil, thinking all the while how odd it would seem to have a woman so
young and beautiful as Mrs. Pentland for a mother-in-law. She was a
charming woman (he thought in his enthusiasm), a great woman, but she
was so sad, as if she had never been very happy. There was always a
cloud about her.
* * * * *
He did not escape quickly enough, for Aunt Cassie’s sharp eyes caught a
glimpse of him as he left the house in the direction of the stables. She
met Olivia in the doorway, kissing her and saying, “Was that Sybil’s
young man I saw leaving?”
“Yes,” said Olivia. “We’ve been talking about Sybil. I’ve been telling
him that he mustn’t think of her as some one to marry.”
The yellow face of Aunt Cassie lighted with a smile of approval. “I’m
glad, my dear, that you’re being sensible about this. I was afraid you
wouldn’t be, but I didn’t like to interfere. I never believe any good
comes of it, unless one is forced to. He’s not the person for Sybil....
Why, no one knows anything about him. You can’t let a girl marry like
that ... just any one who comes along. Besides, Mrs. Pulsifer writes
me.... You remember her, Olivia, the Mannering boy’s aunt who used to
have a house in Chestnut Street.... Well, she lives in Paris now at the
Hotel Continental, and she writes me she’s discovered there’s some
mystery about his mother. No one seems to know much about her.”
“Why,” said Olivia, “should she write you such a thing? What made her
think you’d be interested?”
“Well, Kate Pulsifer and I went to school together and we still
correspond now and then. I just happened to mention the boy’s name when
I was writing her about Sabine. She says, by the way, that Sabine has
very queer friends in Paris and that Sabine has never so much as called
on her or asked her for tea. And there’s been some new scandal about
Sabine’s husband and an Italian woman. It happened in Venice....”
“But he’s not her husband any longer.”
The old lady seated herself and went on pouring forth the news from Kate
Pulsifer’s letter; with each word she appeared to grow stronger and
stronger, less and less yellow and worn.
(“It must be,” thought Olivia, “the effect of so many calamities
contained in one letter.”)
She saw now that she had acted only just in time and she was glad that
she had lied, so flatly, so abruptly, without thinking why she had done
it. For Mrs. Pulsifer was certain to go to the bottom of the affair, if
for no other reason than to do harm to Sabine; she had once lived in a
house on Chestnut Street with a bow-window which swept the entrance to
every house. She was one of John Pentland’s dead, who lived by watching
others live.
4
From the moment she encountered Mr. Gavin on the turnpike until the
tragedy which occurred two days later, life at Pentlands appeared to
lose all reality for Olivia. When she thought of it long afterward, the
hours became a sort of nightmare in which the old enchantment snapped
and gave way to a strained sense of struggle between forces which,
centering about herself, left her in the end bruised and a little
broken, but secure.
The breathless heat of the sort which from time to time enveloped that
corner of New England, leaving the very leaves of the trees hanging limp
and wilted, again settled down over the meadows and marshes, and in the
midst of the afternoon appeared the rarest of sights--the indolent
Sabine stirring in the burning sun. Olivia watched her coming across the
fields, protected from the blazing sun only by the frivolous yellow
parasol. She came slowly, indifferently, and until she entered the cool,
darkened drawing-room she appeared the familiar bored Sabine; only after
she greeted Olivia the difference appeared.
She said abruptly, “I’m leaving day after to-morrow,” and instead of
seating herself to talk, she kept wandering restlessly about the room,
examining Horace Pentland’s bibelots and turning the pages of books and
magazines without seeing them.
“Why?” asked Olivia. “I thought you were staying until October.”
“No, I’m going away at once.” She turned and murmured, “I’ve hated
Durham always. It’s unbearable to me now. I’m bored to death. I only
came, in the first place, because I thought Thérèse ought to know her
own people. But it’s no good. She’ll have none of them. I see now how
like her father she is. They’re not her own people and never will be....
I don’t imagine Durham will ever see either of us again.”
Olivia smiled. “I know it’s dull here.”
“Oh, I don’t mean you, Olivia dear, or even Sybil or O’Hara, but there’s
something in the air.... I’m going to Newport for two weeks and then to
Biarritz for October. Thérèse wants to go to Oxford.” She grinned
sardonically. “There’s a bit of New England in her, after all ... this
education business. I wanted a _femme du monde_ for a daughter and God
and New England sent me a scientist who would rather wear flat heels and
look through a microscope. It’s funny how children turn out.”
(“Even Thérèse and Sabine,” thought Olivia. “Even they belong to it.”)
She watched Sabine, so worldly, so superbly dressed, so hard--such a
restless nomad; and as she watched her it occurred to her again that she
was very like Aunt Cassie--an Aunt Cassie in revolt against Aunt
Cassie’s gods, an Aunt Cassie, as John Pentland had said, “turned inside
out.”
Without looking up from the pages of the _Nouvelle Revue_, Sabine said,
“I’m glad this thing about Sybil is settled.”
“Yes.”
“He told you about his mother?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t let that make any difference? You didn’t tell the others?”
“No.... Anything I had to say would have made no difference.”
“You were wise.... I think Thérèse is right, perhaps ... righter than
any of us. She says that nature has a contempt for marriage
certificates. Respectability can’t turn decay into life ... and Jean is
alive.... So is his mother.”
“I know what you are driving at.”
“Certainly, my dear, you ought to know. You’ve suffered enough from it.
And knowing his mother makes a difference. She’s no ordinary light
woman, or even one who was weak enough to allow herself to be seduced.
Once in fifty years there occurs a woman who can ... how shall I say
it?... get away with a thing like that. You have to be a great woman to
do it. I don’t think it’s made much difference in her life, chiefly
because she’s a woman of discretion and excellent taste. But it might
have made a difference in Jean’s life if he had encountered a mother
less wise than yourself.”
“I don’t know whether I’m being wise or not. I believe in him and I want
Sybil to escape.”
Olivia understood that for the first time they were discussing the thing
which none of them ever mentioned, the thing which up to now Sabine had
only touched upon by insinuation. Sabine had turned away and stood
looking out of the window across the meadows where the distant trees
danced in waves of heat.
“You spoiled my summer a bit, Olivia dear, by taking away my Irish
friend from me.”
Suddenly Olivia was angry as she was angry sometimes at the meddling of
Aunt Cassie. “I didn’t take him away. I did everything possible to avoid
him ... until you came. It was you who threw us together. That’s why
we’re all in a tangle now.” And she kept thinking what a strange woman
Sabine Callendar really was, how intricate and unfathomable. She knew of
no other woman in the world who could talk thus so dispassionately, so
without emotion.
“I thought I’d have him to amuse,” she was saying, “and instead of that
he only uses me as a confidante. He comes to me for advice about another
woman. And that, as you know, isn’t very interesting....”
Olivia sat suddenly erect. “What does he say? What right has he to do
such a thing?”
“Because I’ve asked him to. When I first came here, I promised to help
him. You see, I’m very friendly with you both. I want you both to be
happy and ... besides I can think of nothing happening which could give
me greater pleasure.”
When Olivia did not answer her, she turned from the window and asked
abruptly, “What are you going to do about him?”
Again Olivia thought it best not to answer, but Sabine went on pushing
home her point relentlessly, “You must forgive me for speaking plainly,
but I have a great affection for you both ... and I ... well, I have a
sense of conscience in the affair.”
“You needn’t have. There’s nothing to have a conscience about.”
“You’re not being very honest.”
Suddenly Olivia burst out angrily, “And why should it concern you,
Sabine ... in the least? Why should I not do as I please, without
interference?”
“Because, here ... and you know this as well as I do ... here such a
thing is impossible.”
In a strange fashion she was suddenly afraid of Sabine, perhaps because
she was so bent upon pushing things to a definite solution. It seemed to
Olivia that she herself was losing all power of action, all capacity for
anything save waiting, pretending, doing nothing.
“And I’m interested,” continued Sabine slowly, “because I can’t bear the
tragic spectacle of another John Pentland and Mrs. Soames.”
“There won’t be,” said Olivia desperately. “My father-in-law is
different from Michael.”
“That’s true....”
“In a way ... a finer man.” She found herself suddenly in the amazing
position of actually defending Pentlands.
“But not,” said Sabine with a terrifying reasonableness, “so wise a one
... or one so intelligent.”
“No. It’s impossible to say....”
“A thing like this is likely to come only once to a woman.”
(“Why does she keep repeating the very things that I’ve been fighting
all along,” thought Olivia.) Aloud she said, “Sabine, you must leave me
in peace. It’s for me alone to settle.”
“I don’t want you to do a thing you will regret the rest of your life
... bitterly.”
“You mean....”
“Oh, I mean simply to give him up.”
Again Olivia was silent, and Sabine asked suddenly, “Have you had a call
from a Mr. Gavin? A gentleman with a bald head and a polished face?”
Olivia looked at her sharply. “How could you know that?”
“Because I sent him, my dear ... for the same reason that I’m here now
... because I wanted you to do something ... to act. And I’m confessing
now because I thought you ought to know the truth, since I’m going away.
Otherwise you might think Aunt Cassie or Anson had done it ... and
trouble might come of that.”
Again Olivia said nothing; she was lost in a sadness over the thought
that, after all, Sabine was no better than the others.
“It’s not easy to act in this house,” Sabine was saying. “It’s not easy
to do anything but pretend and go on and on until at last you are an old
woman and die. I did it to help you ... for your own good.”
“That’s what Aunt Cassie always says.”
The shaft went home, for it silenced Sabine, and in the moment’s pause
Sabine seemed less a woman than an amazing, disembodied, almost
malevolent force. When she answered, it was with a shrug of the
shoulders and a bitter smile which seemed doubly bitter on the frankly
painted lips. “I suppose I _am_ like Aunt Cassie. I mightn’t have been,
though.... I might have been just a pleasant normal person ... like
Higgins or one of the servants.”
The strange speech found an echo in Olivia’s heart. Lately the same
thought had come to her again and again--if only she could be simple
like Higgins or the kitchen-maid. Such a state seemed to her at the
moment the most desirable thing in the world. It was perhaps this
strange desire which led Sabine to surround herself with what Durham
called “queer people,” who were, after all, simply people like Higgins
and the kitchen-maid who happened to occupy a higher place in society.
“The air here needs clearing,” Sabine was saying. “It needs a
thunderstorm, and it can be cleared only by acting.... This affair of
Jean and Sybil will help. We are all caught up in a tangle of thoughts
and ideas ... which don’t matter.... You can do it, Olivia. You can
clear the air once and for all.”
Then for the first time Olivia thought she saw what lay behind all this
intriguing of Sabine; for a moment she fancied that she saw what it was
Sabine wanted more passionately than anything else in the world.
Aloud she said it, “I could clear the air, but it would also be the
destruction of everything.”
Sabine looked at her directly. “Well?... and would you be sorry? Would
you count it a loss? Would it make any difference?”
Impulsively she touched Sabine’s hand. “Sabine,” she said, without
looking at her, “I’m fond of you. You know that. Please don’t talk any
more about this ... please, because I want to go on being fond of you
... and I can’t otherwise. It’s our affair, mine and Michael’s ... and
I’m going to settle it, to-night perhaps, as soon as I can have a talk
with him.... I can’t go on any longer.”
Taking up the yellow parasol, Sabine asked, “Do you expect me for dinner
to-night?”
“Of course, more than ever to-night.... I’m sorry you’ve decided to go
so soon.... It’ll be dreary without you or Sybil.”
“You can go, too,” said Sabine quickly. “There is a way. He’d give up
everything for you ... everything. I know that.” Suddenly she gave
Olivia a sharp look. “You’re thirty-eight, aren’t you?”
“Day after to-morrow I shall be forty!”
Sabine was tracing the design of roses on Horace Pentland’s Savonnerie
carpet with the tip of her parasol. “Gather them while you may,” she
said and went out into the blazing heat to cross the meadows to Brook
Cottage.
Left alone, Olivia knew she was glad that day after to-morrow Sabine
would no longer be here. She saw now what John Pentland meant when he
said, “Sabine ought never to have come back here.”
5
The heat clung on far into the evening, penetrating with the darkness
even the drawing-room where they sat--Sabine and John Pentland and old
Mrs. Soames and Olivia--playing bridge for the last time, and as the
evening wore on the game went more and more badly, with the old lady
forgetting her cards and John Pentland being patient and Sabine sitting
in a controlled and sardonic silence, with an expression on her face
which said clearly, “I can endure this for to-night because to-morrow I
shall escape again into the lively world.”
Jean and Sybil sat for a time at the piano, and then fell to watching
the bridge. No one spoke save to bid or to remind Mrs. Soames that it
was time for her shaking hands to distribute the cards about the table.
Even Olivia’s low, quiet voice sounded loud in the hot stillness of the
old room.
At nine o’clock Higgins appeared with a message for Olivia--that Mr.
O’Hara was being detained in town and that if he could get away before
ten he would come down and stop at Pentlands if the lights were still
burning in the drawing-room. Otherwise he would not be down to ride in
the morning.
Once during a pause in the game Sabine stirred herself to say, “I
haven’t asked about Anson’s book. He must be near to the end.”
“Very near,” said Olivia. “There’s very little more to be done. Men are
coming to-morrow to photograph the portraits. He’s using them to
illustrate the book.”
At eleven, when they came to the end of a rubber, Sabine said, “I’m
sorry, but I must stop. I must get up early to-morrow to see about the
packing.” And turning to Jean she said, “Will you drive me home? Perhaps
Sybil will ride over with us for the air. You can bring her back.”
At the sound of her voice, Olivia wanted to cry out, “No, don’t go. You
mustn’t leave me now ... alone. You mustn’t go away like this!” But she
managed to say quietly, in a voice which sounded far away, “Don’t stay
too late, Sybil,” and mechanically, without knowing what she was doing,
she began to put the cards back again in their boxes.
She saw that Sabine went out first, and then John Pentland and old Mrs.
Soames, and that Jean and Sybil remained behind until the others had
gone, until John Pentland had helped the old lady gently into his motor
and driven off with her. Then, looking up with a smile which somehow
seemed to give her pain she said, “Well?”
And Sybil, coming to her side, kissed her and said in a low voice,
“Good-by, darling, for a little while.... I love you....” And Jean
kissed her in a shy fashion on both cheeks.
She could find nothing to say. She knew Sybil would come back, but she
would be a different Sybil, a Sybil who was a woman, no longer the child
who even at eighteen sometimes had the absurd trick of sitting on her
mother’s knee. And she was taking away with her something that until now
had belonged to Olivia, something which she could never again claim. She
could find nothing to say. She could only follow them to the door, from
where she saw Sabine already sitting in the motor as if nothing in the
least unusual were happening; and all the while she wanted to go with
them, to run away anywhere at all.
Through a mist she saw them turning to wave to her as the motor drove
off, to wave gaily and happily because they were at the beginning of
life.... She stood in the doorway to watch the motor-lights slipping
away in silence down the lane and over the bridge through the blackness
to the door of Brook Cottage. There was something about Brook Cottage
... something that was lacking from the air of Pentlands: it was where
Toby Cane and Savina Pentland had had their wanton meetings.
In the still heat the sound of the distant surf came to her dimly across
the marshes, and into her mind came absurdly words she had forgotten for
years.... “The breaking waves dashed high on the stern and rockbound
coast.” Against the accompaniment of the surf, the crickets and katydids
(harbingers of autumn) kept up a fiddling and singing; and far away in
the direction of Marblehead she watched the eye of a lighthouse winking
and winking. She was aware of every sight and sound and odor of the
breathless night. It might storm, she thought, before they got into
Connecticut. They would be motoring all the night....
The lights of Sabine’s motor were moving again now, away from Brook
Cottage, through O’Hara’s land, on and on in the direction of the
turnpike. In the deep hollow by the river they disappeared for a moment
and then were to be seen once more against the black mass of the hill
crowned by the town burial-ground. And then abruptly they were gone,
leaving only the sound of the surf and the music of the crickets and the
distant, ironically winking lighthouse.
She kept seeing them, side by side in the motor racing through the
darkness, oblivious to all else in the world save their own happiness.
Yes, something had gone away from her forever.... She felt a terrible,
passionate envy that was like a physical pain, and all at once she knew
that she was terribly alone standing in the darkness before the door of
the old house.
* * * * *
She was roused by the sound of Anson’s voice asking, “Is that you,
Olivia?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing out there?”
“I came out for some air.”
“Where’s Sybil?”
For a moment she did not answer, and then quite boldly she said, “She’s
ridden over with Jean to take Sabine home.”
“You know I don’t approve of that.” He had come through the hall now and
was standing near her.
“It can’t do any harm.”
“That’s been said before....”
“Why are you so suspicious, Anson, of your own child?” She had no desire
to argue with him. She wanted only to be left in peace, to go away to
her room and lie there alone in the darkness, for she knew now that
Michael was not coming.
“Olivia,” Anson was saying, “come inside for a moment. I want to talk to
you.”
“Very well ... but please don’t be disagreeable. I’m very tired.”
“I shan’t be disagreeable.... I only want to settle something.”
She knew then that he meant to be very disagreeable, and she told
herself that she would not listen to him; she would think of something
else while he was speaking--a trick she had learned long ago. In the
drawing-room she sat quietly and waited for him to begin. Standing by
the mantelpiece, he appeared more tired and yellow than usual. She knew
that he had worked on his book; she knew that he had poured all his
vitality, all his being, into it; but as she watched him her imagination
again played her the old trick of showing her Michael standing there in
his place ... defiant, a little sulky, and filled with a slow, steady,
inexhaustible force.
“It’s chiefly about Sybil,” he said. “I want her to give up seeing this
boy.”
“Don’t be a martinet, Anson. Nothing was ever gained by it.”
(She thought, “They must be almost to Salem by now.”) And aloud she
added, “You’re her father, Anson; why don’t you speak?”
“It’s better for you. I’ve no influence with her.”
“I have spoken,” she said, thinking bitterly that he could never guess
what she meant.
“And what’s the result? Look at her, going off at this hour of the
night....”
She shrugged her shoulders, filled with a warm sense of having outwitted
the enemy, for at the moment Anson seemed to her an enemy not only of
herself, but of Jean and Sybil, of all that was young and alive in the
world.
“Besides,” he was saying, “she hasn’t proper respect for me ... her
father. Sometimes I think it’s the ideas she got from you and from going
abroad to school.”
“What a nasty thing to say! But if you want the truth, I think it’s
because you’ve never been a very good father. Sometimes I’ve thought you
never wanted children. You’ve never paid much attention to them ... not
even to Jack ... while he was alive. It wasn’t ever as if they were
_our_ children. You’ve always left them to me ... alone.”
The thin neck stiffened a little and he said, “There are reasons for
that. I’m a busy man.... I’ve given most of my time, not to making
money, but to doing things to better the world in some way. If I’ve
neglected my children it’s been for a good reason ... few men have as
much on their minds. And there’s been the book to take all my energies.
You’re being unjust, Olivia. You never could see me as I am.”
“Perhaps,” said Olivia. (She wanted to say, “What difference does the
book make to any one in the world? Who cares whether it is written or
not?”) She knew that she must keep up her deceit, so she said, “You
needn’t worry, because Sabine is going away to-morrow and Jean will go
with her.” She sighed. “After that your life won’t be disturbed any
longer. Nothing in the least unusual is likely to happen.”
“And there’s this other thing,” he said, “this disloyalty of yours to me
and to all the family.”
Stiffening slightly, she asked, “What can you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean.”
She saw that he was putting himself in the position of a wronged
husband, assuming a martyrdom of the sort which Aunt Cassie practised so
effectively. He meant to be a patient, well-meaning husband and to place
her in the position of a shameful woman; and slowly, with a slow, heavy
anger, she resolved to circumvent his trick.
“I think, Anson, that you’re talking nonsense. I haven’t been disloyal
to any one. Your father will tell you that.”
“My father was always weak where women are concerned, and now he’s
beginning to grow childish. He’s so old that he’s beginning to forgive
and condone anything.” And then after a silence he said, “This O’Hara.
I’m not such a fool as you think, Olivia.”
For a long time neither of them said anything, and in the end it was
Olivia who spoke, striking straight into the heart of the question. She
said, “Anson, would you consider letting me divorce you?”
The effect upon him was alarming. His face turned gray, and the long,
thin, oversensitive hands began to tremble. She saw that she had touched
him on the rawest of places, upon his immense sense of pride and
dignity. It would be unbearable for him to believe that she would want
to be rid of him in order to go to another man, especially to a man whom
he professed to hold in contempt, a man who had the qualities which he
himself did not possess. He could only see the request as a humiliation
of his own precious dignity.
He managed to grin, trying to turn the request to mockery, and said,
“Have you lost your mind?”
“No, Anson, not for a moment. What I ask is a simple thing. It has been
done before.”
He did not answer her at once, and began to move about the room in the
deepest agitation, a strange figure curiously out of place in the midst
of Horace Pentland’s exotic, beautiful pictures and chairs and
bibelots--as wrong in such a setting as he had been right a month or two
earlier among the museum of Pentland family relics.
“No,” he said again and again. “What you ask is preposterous! To-morrow
when you are less tired you will see how ridiculous it is. No ... I
couldn’t think of such a thing!”
She made an effort to speak quietly. “Is it because you don’t want to
put yourself in such a position?”
“It has nothing to do with that. Why should you want a divorce? We are
well off, content, comfortable, happy....”
She interrupted him, asking, “Are we?”
“What is it you expect, Olivia ... to live always in a sort of romantic
glow? We’re happier than most.”
“No,” she said slowly. “I don’t think happiness has ever meant much to
you, Anson. Perhaps you’re above such things as happiness and
unhappiness. Perhaps you’re more fortunate than most of us. I doubt if
you have ever known happiness or unhappiness, for that matter. You’ve
been uncomfortable when people annoyed you and got in your way, but ...
that’s all. Nothing more than that. Happiness ... I mean it in the
sensible way ... has sometimes to do with delight in living, and I don’t
think you’ve ever known that, even for a moment.”
He turned toward her saying, “I’ve been an honest, God-fearing,
conscientious man, and I think you’re talking nonsense!”
“No, not for a moment.... Heaven knows I ought to know the truth of what
I’ve been saying.”
Again they reached an impasse in the conversation and again they both
remained silent, disturbed perhaps and uneasy in the consciousness that
between them they had destroyed something which could never be restored;
and yet with Olivia there was a cold, sustained sense of balance which
came to her miraculously at such times. She felt, too, that she stood
with her back against a wall, fighting. At last she said, “I would even
let you divorce me--if that would be easier for you. I don’t mind
putting myself in the wrong.”
Again he began to tremble. “Are you trying to tell me that....”
“I’m not telling you anything. There hasn’t been anything at all ... but
... but I would give you grounds if you would agree.”
He turned away from her in disgust. “That is even more impossible.... A
gentleman never divorces his wife.”
“Let’s leave the gentlemen out of it, Anson,” she said. “I’m weary of
hearing what gentlemen do and do not do. I want you to act as yourself,
as Anson Pentland, and not as you think you ought to act. Let’s be
honest. You know you married me only because you had to marry some one
... and I ... I wasn’t actually disreputable, even, as you remind me, if
my father was shanty Irish. And ... let’s be just too. I married you
because I was alone and frightened and wanted to escape a horrible life
with Aunt Alice.... I wanted a home. That was it, wasn’t it? We are both
guilty, but that doesn’t change the reality in the least. No, I fancy
you practised loving me through a sense of duty. You tried it as long as
you could and you hated it always. Oh, I’ve known what was going on.
I’ve been learning ever since I came to Pentlands for the first time.”
He was regarding her now with a fixed expression of horrid fascination;
he was perhaps even dazed at the sound of her voice, slowly, resolutely,
tearing aside all the veils of pretense which had made their life
possible for so long. He kept mumbling, “How can you talk this way? How
can you say such things?”
Slowly, terribly, she went on and on: “We’re both guilty ... and it’s
been a failure, from the very start. I’ve tried to do my best and
perhaps sometimes I’ve failed. I’ve tried to be a good mother ... and
now that Sybil is grown and Jack ... is dead, I want a chance at
freedom. I’m still young enough to want to live a little before it is
too late.”
Between his teeth he said, “Don’t be a fool, Olivia.... You’re forty
years old....”
“You needn’t remind me of that. To-morrow I shall be forty. I know it
... bitterly. But my being forty makes no difference to you. To you it
would be all the same if I were seventy. But to me it makes a difference
... a great difference.” She waited a moment, and then said, “That’s
the truth, Anson; and it’s the truth that interests me to-night. Let me
be free, Anson.... Let me go while being free still means something.”
Perhaps if she had thrown herself at his feet in the attitude of a
wretched, shameful woman, if she had made him feel strong and noble and
heroic, she would have won; but it was a thing she could not do. She
could only go on being coldly reasonable.
“And you would give up all this?” he was saying. “You’d leave Pentlands
and all it stands for to marry this cheap Irishman ... a nobody, the son
perhaps of an immigrant dock-laborer.”
“He _is_ the son of a dock-laborer,” she answered quietly. “And his
mother was a housemaid. He’s told me so himself. And as to all this....
Why, Anson, it doesn’t mean anything to me ... nothing at all that I
can’t give up, nothing which means very much. I’m fond of your father,
Anson, and I’m fond of you when you are yourself and not talking about
what a gentleman would do. But I’d give it all up ... everything ... for
the sake of this other thing.”
For a moment his lips moved silently and in agitation, as if it were
impossible for him to answer things so preposterous as those his wife
had just spoken. At last he was able to say, “I think you must have lost
your mind, Olivia ... to even think of asking such a thing of me. You’ve
lived here long enough to know how impossible it is. Some of us must
make a stand in a community. There has never been a scandal, or even a
divorce, in the Pentland family ... never. We’ve come to stand for
something. Three hundred years of clean, moral living can’t be dashed
aside so easily.... We’re in a position where others look up to us.
Can’t you see that? Can’t you understand such a responsibility?”
For a moment she had a terrible, dizzy, intoxicating sense of power, of
knowing that she held the means of destroying him and all this whited
structure of pride and respectability. She had only to begin by saying,
“There was Savina Pentland and her lover....” The moment passed quickly
and at once she knew that it was a thing she could not do. Instead, she
murmured, “Ah, Anson, do you think the world really looks at us at all?
Do you think it really cares what we do or don’t do? You can’t be as
blind as that.”
“I’m not blind ... only there’s such a thing as honor and tradition. We
stand for something....”
She interrupted him. “For what?”
“For decency, for a glorious past, for stability ... for endless things
... all the things which count in a civilized community.”
He really believed what he was saying; she knew that he must have
believed it to have written all those thousands of dull, laborious words
in glorification of the past.
He went on. “No, what you ask is impossible. You knew it before you
asked.... And it would be a kindness to me if you never mentioned it
again.”
He was still pale, but he had gained control of himself and his hands no
longer trembled; as he talked, as his sense of virtue mounted, he even
grew eloquent, and his voice took on a shade of that unction which had
always colored the voice of the Apostle to the Genteel and made of him a
celebrated and fashionable cleric. Perhaps for the first time since his
childhood, since the days when the red-haired little Sabine had mocked
his curls and velvet suits, he felt himself a strong and powerful
person. There was a kind of fierce intoxication in the knowledge of his
power over Olivia. In his virtuous ardor he seemed for a moment to
become a positive, almost admirable person.
At length she said quietly, “And what if I should simply go away ...
without bothering about a divorce?”
The remark shattered all his confidence once more; and she knew that
she had struck at the weakest point in all his defense--the fear of a
scandal. “You wouldn’t do that!” he cried. “You couldn’t--you couldn’t
behave like a common prostitute!”
“Loving one man is not behaving like a common prostitute.... I never
loved any other.”
“You couldn’t bring such a disgrace on Sybil, even if you don’t care for
the rest of us.”
(“He knew, then, that I couldn’t do such a thing, that I haven’t the
courage. He knows that I’ve lived too long in this world.”) Aloud she
said, “You don’t know me, Anson.... In all these years you’ve never
known me at all.”
“Besides,” he added quickly, “he wouldn’t do such a thing. Such a
climber isn’t likely to throw over his whole career by running away with
a woman. You’d find out if you asked him.”
“But he _is_ willing. He’s already told me so. Perhaps you can’t
understand such a thing.” When he did not answer, she said ironically,
“Besides, I don’t think a gentleman would talk as you are talking. No,
Anson.... I don’t think you know what the world is. You’ve lived here
always, shut up in your own little corner.” Rising, she sighed and
murmured, “But there’s no use in talk. I am going to bed.... I suppose
we must struggle on as best we can ... but there are times ... times
like to-night when you make it hard for me to bear it. Some day ... who
knows ... there’s nothing any longer to keep me....”
She went away without troubling to finish what she had meant to say,
lost again in an overwhelming sense of the futility of everything. She
felt, she thought, like an idiot standing in the middle of an empty
field, making gestures.
CHAPTER X
1
Toward morning the still, breathless heat broke without warning into a
fantastic storm which filled all the sky with blinding light and
enveloped the whole countryside in a wild uproar of wind and thunder,
leaving the dawn to reveal fields torn and ravaged and strewn with
broken branches, and the bright garden bruised and battered by hail.
At breakfast Anson appeared neat and shaven and smooth, as though there
had been no struggle a few hours before in the drawing-room, as if the
thing had made no impression upon the smooth surface which he turned
toward the world. Olivia poured his coffee quietly and permitted him to
kiss her as he had done every day for twenty years--a strange, cold,
absent-minded kiss--and stood in the doorway to watch him drive off to
the train. Nothing had changed; it seemed to her that life at Pentlands
had become incapable of any change.
And as she turned from the door Peters summoned her to the telephone to
receive the telegram from Jean and Sybil; they had been married at seven
in Hartford.
She set out at once to find John Pentland and after a search she came
upon him in the stable-yard talking with Higgins. The strange pair stood
by the side of the red mare, who watched them with her small, vicious
red eyes; they were talking in that curious intimate way which descended
upon them at the mention of horses, and as she approached she was
struck, as she always was, by the fiery beauty of the animal, the pride
of her lean head, the trembling of the fine nostrils as she breathed,
the savagery of her eye. She was a strange, half-evil, beautiful beast.
Olivia heard Higgins saying that it was no use trying to breed her ...
an animal like that, who kicked and screamed and bit at the very sight
of another horse....
Higgins saw her first and, touching his cap, bade her good-morning, and
as the old man turned, she said, “I’ve news for you, Mr. Pentland.”
A shrewd, queer look came into his eyes and he asked, “Is it about
Sybil?”
“Yes.... It’s done.”
She saw that Higgins was mystified, and she was moved by a desire to
tell him. Higgins ought to know certainly among the first. And she
added, “It’s about Miss Sybil. She married young Mr. de Cyon this
morning in Hartford.”
The news had a magical effect on the little groom; his ugly, shriveled
face expanded into a broad grin and he slapped his thigh in his
enthusiasm. “That’s grand, Ma’am.... I don’t mind telling you I was for
it all along. She couldn’t have done better ... nor him either.”
Again moved by impulse, she said, “So you think it’s a good thing?”
“It’s grand, Ma’am. He’s one in a million. He’s the only one I know who
was good enough. I was afraid she was going to throw herself away on Mr.
O’Hara.... But she ought to have a younger man.”
She turned away from him, pleased and relieved from the anxiety which
had never really left her since the moment they drove off into the
darkness. She kept thinking, “Higgins is always right about people. He
has a second sight.” Somehow, of them all, she trusted him most as a
judge.
John Pentland led her away, out of range of Higgins’ curiosity, along
the hedge that bordered the gardens. The news seemed to affect him
strangely, for he had turned pale, and for a long time he simply stood
looking over the hedge in silence. At last he asked, “When did they do
it?”
“Last night.... She went for a drive with him and they didn’t come
back.”
“I hope we’ve been right ...” he said. “I hope we haven’t connived at a
foolish thing.”
“No.... I’m sure we haven’t.”
Something in the brilliance of the sunlight, in the certainty of Sybil’s
escape and happiness, in the freshness of the air touched after the
storm by the first faint feel of autumn, filled her with a sense of
giddiness, so that she forgot her own troubles; she forgot, even, that
this was her fortieth birthday.
“Did they go in Sabine’s motor?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Grinning suddenly, he said, “She thought perhaps that she was doing us a
bad turn.”
“No, she knew that I approved. She did think of it first. She did
propose it....”
When he spoke again there was a faint hint of bitterness in his voice.
“I’m sure she did. I only hope she’ll stop her mischief with this. In
any case, she’s had a victory over Cassie ... and that’s what she
wanted, more than anything....” He turned toward her sharply, with an
air of anxiety. “I suppose he’ll take her away with him?”
“Yes. They’re going to Paris first and then to the Argentine.”
Suddenly he touched her shoulder with the odd, shy gesture of affection.
“It’ll be hard for you, Olivia dear ... without her.”
The sudden action brought a lump into her throat, and yet she did not
want to be pitied. She hated pity, because it implied weakness on her
part.
“Oh,” she said quickly, “they’ll come back from time to time.... I think
that some day they may come back here to live.”
“Yes.... Pentlands will belong to them one day.”
And then for the first time she remembered that there was something
which she had to tell him, something which had come to seem almost a
confession. She must tell him now, especially since Jean would one day
own all of Pentlands and all the fortune.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you before,” she began. “It’s something
which I kept to myself because I wanted Sybil to have her happiness ...
in spite of everything.”
He interrupted her, saying, “I know what it is.”
“You couldn’t know what I mean.”
“Yes; the boy told me himself. I went to him to talk about Sybil because
I wanted to make sure of him ... and after a time he told me. It was an
honorable thing for him to have done. He needn’t have told. Sabine would
never have told us ... never until it was too late.”
The speech left her feeling weak and disconcerted, for she had expected
anger from him and disapproval. She had been fearful that he might treat
her silence as a disloyalty to him, that it might in the end shatter the
long, trusting relationship between them.
“The boy couldn’t help it,” he was saying. “It’s a thing one can’t
properly explain. But he’s a nice boy ... and Sybil was so set on him. I
think she has a good, sensible head on her young shoulders.” Sighing and
turning toward her again, he added, “I wouldn’t speak of it to the
others ... not even to Anson. They may never know, and if they don’t
what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
The mystery of him, it seemed, grew deeper and deeper each time they
talked thus, intimately, perhaps because there were in the old man
depths which she had never believed possible. Perhaps, deep down beneath
all the fierce reticence of his nature, there lay a humanity far greater
than any she had ever encountered. She thought, “And I have always
believed him hard and cold and disapproving.” She was beginning to
fathom the great strength that lay in his fierce isolation, the strength
of a man who had always been alone.
“And you, Olivia?” he asked presently. “Are you happy?”
“Yes.... At least, I’m happy this morning ... on account of Sybil and
Jean.”
“That’s right,” he said with a gentle sadness. “That’s right. They’ve
done what you and I were never able to do, Olivia. They’ll have what
we’ve never had and never can have because it’s too late. And we’ve
helped them to gain it.... That’s something. I merely wanted you to know
that I understood.” And then, “We’d better go and tell the others. The
devil will be to pay when they hear.”
She would have gone away then, but an odd thought occurred to her, a
hope, feeble enough, but one which might give him a little pleasure. She
was struck again by his way of speaking, as if he were very near to
death or already dead. He had the air of a very old and weary man.
She said, “There’s one thing I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time.”
She hesitated and then plunged. “It was about Savina Pentland. Did she
ever have more than one child?”
He looked at her sharply out of the bright black eyes and asked, “Why do
you want to know that?”
She tried to deceive him by shrugging her shoulders and saying casually,
“I don’t know ... I’ve become interested lately, perhaps on account of
Anson’s book.”
“You ... interested in the past, Olivia?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, she only had one child ... and then she was drowned when he was
only a year old. He was my grandfather.” Again he looked at her sharply.
“Olivia, you must tell me the truth. Why did you ask me that question?”
Again she hesitated, saying, “I don’t know ... it seemed to me....”
“Did you find something? Did _she_,” he asked, making the gesture toward
the north wing, “did _she_ tell you anything?”
She understood then that he, marvelous old man, must even know about the
letters. “Yes,” she said in a low voice, “I found something ... in the
attic.”
He sighed and looked away again, across the wet meadows. “So you know,
too.... _She_ found them first, and hid them away again. She wouldn’t
give them to me because she hated me ... from our wedding-night. I’ve
told you about that. And then she couldn’t remember where she’d hid them
... poor thing. But she told me about them. At times she used to taunt
me by saying that I wasn’t a Pentland at all. I think the thing made her
mind darker than it was before. She had some terrible idea about the sin
in my family for which she must atone....”
“It’s true,” said Olivia softly. “There’s no doubt of it. It was written
by Toby Cane himself ... in his own handwriting. I’ve compared it with
the letters Anson has of his.” After a moment she asked, “And you ...
you’ve known it always?”
“Always,” he said sadly. “It explains many things.... Sometimes I think
that those of us who have lived since have had to atone for their sin.
It’s all worked out in a harsh way, when you come to think of it....”
She guessed what it was he meant. She saw again that he believed in such
a thing as sin, that the belief in it was rooted deeply in his whole
being.
“Have you got the letters, Olivia?” he asked.
“No ... I burned them ... last night ... because I was afraid of them.
I was afraid that I might do something shameful with them. And if they
were burned, no one would believe such a preposterous story and there
wouldn’t be any proof. I was afraid, too,” she added softly, “of what
was in them ... not what was written there, so much as the way it was
written.”
He took her hand and with the oddest, most awkward gesture, kissed it
gently. “You were right, Olivia dear,” he said. “It’s all they have ...
the others ... that belief in the past. We daren’t take that from them.
The strong daren’t oppress the weak. It would have been too cruel. It
would have destroyed the one thing into which Anson poured his whole
life. You see, Olivia, there are people ... people like you ... who have
to be strong enough to look out for the others. It’s a hard task ... and
sometimes a cruel one. If it weren’t for such people the world would
fall apart and we’d see it for the cruel, unbearable place it is. That’s
why I’ve trusted everything to you. That’s what I was trying to tell you
the other night. You see, Olivia, I know you ... I know there are things
which people like us can’t do.... Perhaps it’s because we’re weak or
foolish--who knows? But it’s true. I knew that you were the sort who
would do just such a thing.”
Listening to him, she again felt all her determination slipping from
her. It was a strange sensation, as if he took possession of her,
leaving her powerless to act, prisoning her again in that terrible wall
of rightness in which he believed. The familiar sense of his strength
frightened her, because it seemed a force so irresistible. It was the
strength of one who was more than right; it was the strength of one who
_believed_.
She had a fierce impulse to turn from him and to run swiftly,
recklessly, across the wet meadows toward Michael, leaving forever
behind her the placid, beautiful old house beneath the elms.
“There are some things,” he was saying, “which it is impossible to do
... for people like us, Olivia. They are impossible because the mere act
of doing them would ruin us forever. They aren’t things which we can do
gracefully.”
And she knew again what it was that he meant, as she had known vaguely
while she stood alone in the darkness before the figures of Higgins and
Miss Egan emerged from the mist of the marshes.
“You had better go now and telephone to Anson. I fancy he’ll be badly
upset, but I shall put an end to that ... and Cassie, too. She had it
all planned for the Mannering boy.”
2
Anson was not to be reached all the morning at the office; he had gone,
so his secretary said, to a meeting of the Society of Guardians of Young
Working Girls without Homes and left express word that he was not to be
disturbed. But Aunt Cassie heard the news when she arrived on her
morning call at Pentlands. Olivia broke it to her as gently as possible,
but as soon as the old lady understood what had happened, she went to
pieces badly. Her eyes grew wild; she wept, and her hair became all
disheveled. She took the attitude that Sybil had been seduced and was
now a woman lost beyond all hope. She kept repeating between
punctuations of profound sympathy for Olivia in the hour of her trial,
that such a thing had never happened in the Pentland family; until
Olivia, enveloped in the old, perilous calm, reminded her of the
elopement of Jared Pentland and Savina Dalgedo and bade her abruptly to
stop talking nonsense.
And then Aunt Cassie was deeply hurt by her tone, and Peters had to be
sent away for smelling-salts at the very moment that Sabine arrived,
grinning and triumphant. It was Sabine who helped administer the
smelling-salts with the grim air of administering burning coals. When
the old lady grew a little more calm she fell again to saying over and
over again, “Poor Sybil.... My poor, innocent little Sybil ... that this
should have happened to her!”
To which Olivia replied at last, “Jean is a fine young man. I’m sure she
couldn’t have done better.” And then, to soften a little Aunt Cassie’s
anguish, she said, “And he’s very rich, Aunt Cassie ... a great deal
richer than many a husband she might have found here.”
The information had an even better effect than the smelling-salts, so
that the old lady became calm enough to take an interest in the details
and asked where they had found a motor to go away in.
“It was mine,” said Sabine dryly. “I loaned it to them.”
The result of this statement was all that Sabine could have desired. The
old lady sat bolt upright, all bristling, and cried, with an air of
suffocation, “Oh, you viper! Why God should have sent me such a trial, I
don’t know. You’ve always wished us evil and now I suppose you’re
content! May God have mercy on your malicious soul!” And breaking into
fresh sobs, she began all over again, “My poor, innocent little
Sybil.... What will people say? What will they think has been going on!”
“Don’t be evil-minded, Aunt Cassie,” said Sabine sharply; and then in a
calmer voice, “It will be hard on me.... I won’t be able to go to
Newport until they come back with the motor.”
“You!... You!...” began Aunt Cassie, and then fell back, a broken woman.
“I suppose,” continued Sabine ruthlessly, “that we ought to tell the
Mannering boy.”
“Yes,” cried Aunt Cassie, reviving again, “Yes! There’s the boy she
ought to have married....”
“And Mrs. Soames,” said Sabine. “She’ll be pleased at the news.”
Olivia spoke for the first time in nearly half an hour. “It’s no use.
Mr. Pentland has been over to see her, but she didn’t understand what it
was he wanted to tell her. She was in a daze ... only half-conscious ...
and they think she may not recover this time.”
In a whisper, lost in the greater agitation of Aunt Cassie’s sobs, she
said to Sabine, “It’s like the end of everything for him. I don’t know
what he’ll do.”
* * * * *
The confusion of the day seemed to increase rather than to die away.
Aunt Cassie was asked to stay to lunch, but she said it was impossible
to consider swallowing even a crust of bread. “It would choke me!” she
cried melodramatically.
“It is an excellent lunch,” urged Olivia.
“No ... no ... don’t ask me!”
But, unwilling to quit the scene of action, she lay on Horace Pentland’s
Regence sofa and regained her strength a little by taking a nap while
the others ate.
At last Anson called, and when the news was told him, the telephone
echoed with his threats. He would, he said, hire a motor (an
extravagance by which to gage the profundity of his agitation) and come
down at once.
And then, almost immediately, Michael telephoned. “I have just come
down,” he said, and asked Olivia to come riding with him. “I must talk
to you at once.”
She refused to ride, but consented to meet him half-way, at the pine
thicket where Higgins had discovered the foxcubs. “I can’t leave just
now,” she told him, “and I don’t think it’s best for you to come here at
the moment.”
For some reason, perhaps vaguely because she thought he might use the
knowledge as a weapon to break down her will, she said nothing of the
elopement. For in the confusion of the day, beneath all the uproar of
scenes, emotions and telephone-calls, she had been thinking, thinking,
thinking, so that in the end the uproar had made little impression upon
her. She had come to understand that John Pentland must have lived thus,
year after year, moving always in a secret life of his own, and
presently she had come to the conclusion that she must send Michael away
once and for all.
As she moved across the meadow she noticed that the birches had begun to
turn yellow and that in the low ground along the river the meadows were
already painted gold and purple by masses of goldenrod and ironweed.
With each step she seemed to grow weaker and weaker, and as she drew
near the blue-black wall of pines she was seized by a violent trembling,
as if the sense of his presence were able somehow to reach out and
engulf her even before she saw him. She kept trying to think of the old
man as he stood beside her at the hedge, but something stronger than her
will made her see only Michael’s curly black head and blue eyes. She
began even to pray ... she (Olivia) who never prayed because the piety
of Aunt Cassie and Anson and the Apostle to the Genteel stood always in
her way.
And then, looking up, she saw him standing half-hidden among the lower
pines, watching her. She began to run toward him, in terror lest her
knees should give way and let her fall before she reached the shelter of
the trees.
In the darkness of the thicket where the sun seldom penetrated, he put
his arms about her and kissed her in a way he had never done before, and
the action only increased her terror. She said nothing; she only wept
quietly; and at last, when she had gained control of herself, she
struggled free and said, “Don’t, Michael ... please don’t ... please.”
They sat on a fallen log and, still holding her hand, he asked, “What is
it? What has happened?”
“Nothing.... I’m just tired.”
“Are you willing to come away with me? Now?” And in a low, warm voice,
he added, “I’ll never let you be tired again ... never.”
She did not answer him, because it seemed to her that what she had to
tell him made all her actions in the past seem inexplicable and cheap.
She was filled with shame, and tried to put off the moment when she must
speak.
“I haven’t been down in three days,” he was saying, “because there’s
been trouble in Boston which made it impossible. I’ve only slept an hour
or two a night. They’ve been trying to do me in ... some of the men I
always trusted. They’ve been double-crossing me all along and I had to
stay to fight them.”
He told her a long and complicated story of treachery, of money having
been passed among men whom he had known and trusted always. He was sad
and yet defiant, too, and filled with a desire to fight the thing to an
end. She failed to understand the story; indeed she did not even hear
much of it: she only knew that he was telling her everything, pouring
out all his sadness and trouble to her as if she were the one person in
all the world to whom he could tell such things.
And when he had finished he waited for a moment and then said, “And now
I’m willing to chuck the whole dirty business and quit ... to tell them
all to go to hell.”
Quickly she answered, “No, you mustn’t do that. You can’t do that. A man
like you, Michael, daren’t do such a thing....” For she knew that
without a battle life would mean nothing to him.
“No ... I mean it. I’m ready to quit. I want you to go with me.”
She thought, “He says this ... and yet he stayed three days and nights
in Boston to fight!” She saw that he was not looking at her, but sitting
with his head in his hands; there was something broken, almost pitiful,
in his manner, and it occurred to her that perhaps for the first time he
found all his life in a hopeless tangle. She thought, “If I had never
known him, this might not have happened. He would have been able to
fight without even thinking of me.”
Aloud she said, “I can’t do it, Michael.... It’s no use. I can’t.”
He looked up quickly, but before he could speak she placed her hand over
his lips, saying, “Wait, Michael, let me talk first. Let me say what
I’ve wanted to say for so long.... I’ve thought.... I’ve done nothing
else but think day and night for the past three days. And it’s no good,
Michael.... It’s no good. I’m forty years old to-day, and what can I
give you that will make up for all you will lose? Why should you give up
everything for me? No, I’ve nothing to offer. You can go back and fight
and win. It’s what you like more than anything in the world ... more
than any woman ... even me.”
Again he tried to speak, but she silenced him. “Oh, I know it’s true ...
what I say. And if I had you at such a price, you’d only hate me in the
end. I couldn’t do it, Michael, because ... because in the end, with men
like you it’s work, it’s a career, which is first.... You couldn’t bear
giving up. You couldn’t bear failure.... And in the end that’s right, as
it should be. It’s what keeps the world going.”
He was watching her with a look of fascination in his eyes, and she
knew--she was certain of it--that he had never been so much in love with
her before; but she knew, too, from the shadow which crossed his face
(it seemed to her that he almost winced) and because she knew him so
well, that he recognized the truth of what she had said.
“It’s not true, Olivia.... You can’t go back on me now ... just when I
need you most.”
“I’d be betraying you, Michael, if I did the other thing. It’s not me
you need half so much as the other thing. Oh, I know that I’m right.
What you should have in the end is a young woman ... a woman who will
help you. It doesn’t matter very much whether you’re terribly in love
with her or not ... but a woman who can be your wife and bear your
children and give dinner parties and help make of you the famous man
you’ve always meant to be. You need some one who will help you to found
a family, to fill your new house with children ... some one who’ll help
you and your children to take the place of families like ours who are at
the end of things. No, Michael ... I’m right.... Look at me,” she
commanded suddenly. “Look at me and you’ll know that it’s not because I
don’t love you.”
He was on his knees now, on the carpet of scented pine-needles, his arms
about her while she stroked the thick black hair with a kind of
hysterical intensity.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Olivia. It’s not true! It’s not
true! I’d give up everything.... I don’t want the other thing. I’ll sell
my farm and go away from here forever with you.”
“Yes, Michael, you think that to-day, just now ... and to-morrow
everything will be changed. That’s one of the mean tricks Nature plays
us. It’s not so simple as that. We’re not like Higgins and ... the
kitchen-maid ... at least not in some ways.”
“Olivia ... Olivia, do you love me enough to....”
She knew what he meant to ask. She thought, “What does it matter? Why
should I not, when I love him so? I should be harming no one ... no one
but myself.”
And then, abruptly, through the mist of tears she saw through an opening
in the thicket a little procession crossing the meadows toward the big
house at Pentlands. She saw it with a terrible, intense clarity ... a
little procession of the gardener and his helper carrying between them
on a shutter a figure that lay limp and still, and following them came
Higgins on foot, leading his horse and moving with the awkward rolling
gait which afflicted him when his feet were on the ground. She knew who
the still figure was. It was John Pentland. The red mare had killed him
at last. And she heard him saying, “There are some things which people
like us, Olivia, can’t do.”
* * * * *
What happened immediately afterward she was never able to remember very
clearly. She found herself joining the little procession; she knew that
Michael was with her, and that there could be no doubt of the
tragedy.... John Pentland was dead, with his neck broken. He lay on the
shutter, still and peaceful, the bitter lines all melted from the grim,
stern face, as he had been when she came upon him in the library
smelling of dogs and woodsmoke and whisky. Only this time he had escaped
for good....
And afterward she remembered telling Michael, as they stood alone in the
big white hall, that Sybil and Jean were married, and dismissing him by
saying, “_Now_, Michael, it is impossible. While he was living I might
have done it.... I might have gone away. But now it’s impossible. Don’t
ask me. Please leave me in peace.”
Standing there under the wanton gaze of Savina Pentland, she watched him
go away, quietly, perhaps because he understood that all she had said
was true.
3
In the tragedy the elopement became lost and forgotten. Doctors came
and went; even reporters put in an awkward appearance, eager for details
of the death and the marriage in the Pentland family, and somehow the
confusion brought peace to Olivia. They forgot her, save as one who
managed everything quietly; for they had need just then of some one who
did not break into wild spasms of grief or wander about helplessly. In
the presence of death, Anson forgot even his anger over the elopement,
and late in the afternoon Olivia saw him for the first time when he came
to her helplessly to ask, “The men have come to photograph the
portraits. What shall we do?”
And she answered, “Send them away. We can photograph ancestors any time.
They’ll always be with us.”
Sabine volunteered to send word to Sybil and Jean. At such times all her
cold-blooded detachment made of her a person of great value, and Olivia
knew that she could be trusted to find them because she wanted her motor
again desperately. Remembering her promise to the old man, she went
across to see Mrs. Soames, but nothing came of it, for the old lady had
fallen into a state of complete unconsciousness. She would, they told
Olivia, probably die without ever knowing that John Pentland had gone
before her.
Aunt Cassie took up her throne in the darkened drawing-room and there,
amid the acrid smell of the first chrysanthemums of the autumn, she held
a red-eyed, snuffling court to receive the calls of all the countryside.
Again she seemed to rise for a time triumphant and strong, even
overcoming her weakness enough to go and come from the gazeboed house on
foot, arriving early and returning late. She insisted upon summoning
Bishop Smallwood to conduct the services, and discovered after much
trouble that he was attending a church conference in the West. In reply
to her telegram she received only an answer that it was impossible for
him to return, even if they delayed the funeral ... that in the rôle of
prominent defender of the Virgin Birth he could not leave the field at a
moment when the power of his party was threatened.
It seemed for a time that, as Sabine had hoped, the whole structure of
the family was falling about them in ruins.
As for Olivia, she would have been at peace save that three times within
two days notes came to her from Michael--notes which she sent back
unopened because she was afraid to read them; until at last she wrote on
the back of one, “There is nothing more to say. Leave me in peace.” And
after that there was only silence, which in a strange way seemed to her
more unbearable than the sight of his writing. She discovered that two
persons had witnessed the tragedy--Higgins, who had been riding with the
old man, and Sabine, who had been walking the river path--walking only
because Jean and Sybil had her motor. Higgins knew only that the mare
had run off and killed his master; but Sabine had a strangely different
version, which she recounted to Olivia as they sat in her room, the day
after.
“I saw them,” she said, “coming across the meadow.... Cousin John, with
Higgins following. And then, all at once, the mare seemed to be
frightened by something and began to run ... straight in a line for the
gravel-pit. It was a fascinating sight ... a horrible sight ... because
I knew--I was certain--what was going to happen. For a moment Cousin
John seemed to fight with her, and then all at once he leaned forward on
her neck and let her go. Higgins went after him; but it was no use
trying to catch her.... One might as well have tried to overtake a
whirlwind. They seemed to fly across the fields straight for the line of
elders that hid the pit, and I knew all the while that there was no
saving them unless the mare turned. At the bushes the mare jumped ...
the prettiest jump I’ve ever seen a horse make, straight above the
bushes into the open air....”
For a moment Sabine’s face was lighted by a macabre enthusiasm. Her
voice wavered a little. “It was a horrible, beautiful sight. For a
moment they seemed almost to rise in the air as if the mare were flying,
and then all at once they fell ... into the bottom of the pit.”
Olivia was silent, and presently, as if she had been waiting for the
courage, Sabine continued in a low voice, “But there’s one thing I saw
beyond any doubt. At the edge of the pit the mare tried to turn. She
would have turned away, but Cousin John raised his crop and struck her
savagely. There was no doubt of it. He forced her over the elders....”
Again after a pause, “Higgins must have seen it, too. He followed them
to the very edge of the pit. I shall always see him there, sitting on
his horse outlined against the sky. He was looking down into the pit and
for a moment the horse and man together looked exactly like a
centaur.... It was an extraordinary impression.”
She remembered him thus, but she remembered him, too, as she had seen
him on the night of the ball, slipping away through the lilacs like a
shadow. Rising, she said, “Jean and Sybil will be back to-morrow, and
then I’ll be off for Newport. I thought you might want to know what
Higgins and I knew, Olivia.” For a moment she hesitated, looking out of
the window toward the sea. And at last she said, “He was a queer man. He
was the last of the great Puritans. There aren’t any more. None of the
rest of us believe anything. We only pretend....”
But Olivia scarcely heard her. She understood now why it was that the
old man had talked to her as if he were very near to death, and she
thought, “He did it in a way that none would ever discover. He trusted
Higgins, and Sabine was an accident. Perhaps ... perhaps ... he did it
to keep me here ... to save the thing he believed in all his life.”
It was a horrible thought which she tried to kill, but it lingered,
together with the regret that she had never finished what she had begun
to tell him as they stood by the hedge talking of the letters--that one
day Jean might take the name of John Pentland. He had, after all, as
much right to it as he had to the name of de Cyon; it would be only a
little change, but it would allow the name of Pentland to go on and on.
All the land, all the money, all the tradition, would go down to
Pentland children, and so make a reason for their existence; and in the
end the name would be something more then than a thing embalmed in “The
Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” The descendants would
be, after all, of Pentland blood, or at least of the blood of Savina
Dalgedo and Toby Cane, which had come long ago to be Pentland blood.
And she thought grimly, “He was right, after all. I am one of them at
last ... in spite of everything. It’s I who am carrying on now.”
* * * * *
On the morning of the funeral, as she stood on the terrace expecting
Jean and Sybil, Higgins, dressed in his best black suit and looking
horribly awkward and ill at ease, came toward her to say, looking away
from her, “Mr. O’Hara is going away. They’re putting up a ‘For Sale’
sign on his gate. He isn’t coming back.” And then looking at her boldly
he added, “I thought you might want to know, Mrs. Pentland.”
For a moment she had a sudden, fierce desire to cry out, “No, he mustn’t
go! You must tell him to stay. I can’t let him go away like that!” She
wanted suddenly to run across the fields to the bright, vulgar, new
house, to tell him herself. She thought, “He meant, then, what he said.
He’s given up everything here.”
But she knew, too, that he had gone away to fight, freed now and moved
only by his passion for success, for victory.
And before she could answer Higgins, who stood there wanting her to send
him to Michael, Miss Egan appeared, starched and rigid and wearing the
professional expression of solemnity which she adopted in the presence
of bereaved families. She said, “It’s about _her_, Mrs. Pentland. She
seems very bright this morning and quite in her right mind. She wants to
know why he hasn’t been to see her for two whole days. I thought....”
Olivia interrupted her quietly. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll go and
tell her. I’ll explain. It’s better for me to do it.”
She went away into the house, knowing bitterly that she left Miss Egan
and Higgins thinking of her with pity.
As she climbed the worn stair carpet to the north wing, she knew
suddenly a profound sense of peace such as she had not known for years.
It was over and done now, and life would go on the same as it had always
done, filled with trickiness and boredom and deceits, but pleasant, too,
in spite of everything, perhaps because, as John Pentland had said, “One
had sometimes to pretend.” And, after all, Sybil had escaped and was
happy.
She knew now that she herself would never escape; she had been too long
a part of Pentlands, and she knew that what the old man had said was the
truth. She had acted thus not because of duty, or promises, or nobility,
or pride, or even out of virtue.... Perhaps it was even because she was
not strong enough to do otherwise. But she knew that she had acted thus
because, as he said, “There are things, Olivia, which people like us
can’t do.”
And as she moved along the narrow hall, she saw from one of the deep-set
windows the figure of Sabine moving along the lane in a faint cloud of
dust, and nearer at hand, at the entrance of the elm-bordered drive,
Aunt Cassie in deep black, coming along briskly in a cloud of crape.
No, nothing had changed. It would go on and on....
The door opened and the sickly odor of medicines flooded the hallway.
Out of the darkness came the sound of a feeble, reed-like voice,
terrible in its sanity, saying, “Oh, it’s you, Olivia. I knew you’d
come. I’ve been waiting for you....”
THE END
_Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island_
_June 4, 1925_
_St. Jean-de-Luz, B. P., France_
_July 21, 1926_
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
lay figure=> clay figure {pg 6}
sarcely giving=> scarcely giving {pg 205}
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