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.