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.