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.