1
When Anson Pentland came down from the city in the evening, Olivia was
always there to meet him dutifully and inquire about the day. The
answers were always the same: “No, there was not much doing in town,”
and, “It was very hot,” or, “I made a discovery to-day that will be of
great use to me in the book.”
Then after a bath he would appear in tweeds to take his exercise in the
garden, pottering about mildly and peering closely with his near-sighted
blue eyes at little tags labeled “General Pershing” or “Caroline
Testout” or “Poincaré” or “George Washington” which he tied carefully on
the new dahlias and roses and smaller shrubs. And, more often than not,
the gardener would spend half the next morning removing the tags and
placing them on the proper plants, for Anson really had no interest in
flowers and knew very little about them. The tagging was only a part of
his passion for labeling things; it made the garden at Pentlands seem a
more subdued and ordered place. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that he
went through life ticketing and pigeonholing everything that came his
way: manners, emotions, thoughts, everything. It was a habit that was
growing on him in middle-age.
Dinner was usually late because Anson liked to take advantage of the
long summer twilights, and after dinner it was the habit of all the
family, save Jack, who went to bed immediately afterward, to sit in the
Victorian drawing-room, reading and writing letters or sometimes playing
patience, with Anson in his corner at Mr. Lowell’s desk working over
“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and keeping up a
prodigious correspondence with librarians and old men and women of a
genealogical bent. The routine of the evening rarely changed, for Anson
disliked going out and Olivia preferred not to go alone. It was only
with the beginning of the summer, when Sybil was grown and had begun to
go out occasionally to dinners and balls, and the disturbing Sabine,
with her passion for playing bridge, had come into the neighborhood,
that the routine was beginning to break up. There were fewer evenings
now with Olivia and Sybil playing patience and old John Pentland sitting
by the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or simply staring silently
before him, lost in thought.
There were times in those long evenings when Olivia, looking up suddenly
and for no reason at all, would discover that Sybil was sitting in the
same fashion watching her, and both of them would know that they, like
old John Pentland, had been sitting there all the while holding books in
their hands without knowing a word of what they had read. It was as if a
kind of enchantment descended upon them, as if they were waiting for
something. Once or twice the silence had been broken sharply by the
unbearable sound of groans coming from the north wing when _she_ had
been seized suddenly by one of her fits of violence.
Anson’s occasional comment and Olivia’s visits to Jack’s room to see
that nothing had happened to him were the only interruptions. They spoke
always in low voices when they played double patience in order not to
disturb Anson at his work. Sometimes he encountered a bit of information
for which he had been searching for a long time and then he would turn
and tell them of it.
There was the night when he made his discovery about Savina
Pentland....
“I was right about Savina Pentland,” he said. “She _was_ a first cousin
and not a second cousin of Toby Cane.”
Olivia displayed an interest by saying, “Was that what you wrote to the
_Transcript_ about?”
“Yes ... and I was sure that the genealogical editor was wrong. See ...
here it is in one of Jared Pentland’s letters at the time she was
drowned.... Jared was her husband.... He refers to Toby Cane as her only
male first cousin.”
“That will help you a great deal,” said Olivia, “won’t it?”
“It will help clear up the chapter about the origins of her family.” And
then, after a little pause, “I wish that I could get some trace of the
correspondence between Savina Pentland and Cane. I’m sure it would be
full of things ... but it seems not to exist ... only one or two letters
which tell nothing.”
And then he relapsed again into a complete and passionate silence, lost
in the rustle of old books and yellowed letters, leaving the legend of
Savina Pentland to take possession of the others in the room.
The memory of this woman had a way of stealing in upon the family
unaware, quite without their willing it. She was always there in the
house, more lively than any of the more sober ancestors, perhaps because
of them all she alone had been touched by splendor; she alone had been
in her reckless way a great lady. There was a power in her recklessness
and extravagance which came, in the end, to obscure all those other
plain, solemn-faced, thrifty wives whose portraits adorned the hall of
Pentlands, much as a rising sun extinguishes the feeble light of the
stars. And about her obscure origin there clung a perpetual aura of
romance, since there was no one to know just who her mother was or
exactly whence she came. The mother was born perhaps of stock no humbler
than the first shopkeeping Pentland to land on the Cape, but there was
in her the dark taint of Portuguese blood; some said that she was the
daughter of a fisherman. And Savina herself had possessed enough of
fascination to lure a cautious Pentland into eloping with her against
the scruples that were a very fiber of the Pentland bones and flesh.
The portrait of Savina Pentland stood forth among the others in the
white hall, fascinating and beautiful not only because the subject was a
dark, handsome woman, but because it had been done by Ingres in Rome
during the years when he made portraits of tourists to save himself from
starvation. It was the likeness of a small but voluptuous woman with
great wanton dark eyes and smooth black hair pulled back from a
camellia-white brow and done in a little knot on the nape of the white
neck--a woman who looked out of the old picture with the flashing,
spirited glance of one who lived boldly and passionately. She wore a
gown of peach-colored velvet ornamented with the famous parure of pearls
and emeralds given her, to the scandal of a thrifty family, by the
infatuated Jared Pentland. Passing the long gallery of portraits in the
hallway it was always Savina Pentland whom one noticed. She reigned
there as she must have reigned in life, so bold and splendorous as to
seem a bit vulgar, especially in a world of such sober folk, yet so
beautiful and so spirited that she made all the others seem scarcely
worth consideration.
Even in death she had remained an “outsider,” for she was the only one
of the family who did not rest quietly among the stunted trees at the
top of the bald hill where the first Pentlands had laid their dead. All
that was left of the warm, soft body lay in the white sand at the bottom
of the ocean within sight of Pentlands. It was as if fate had delivered
her in death into a grave as tempestuous and violent as she had been in
life. And somewhere near her in the restless white sand lay Toby Cane,
with whom she had gone sailing one bright summer day when a sudden
squall turned a gay excursion into a tragedy.
Even Aunt Cassie, who distrusted any woman with gaze so bold and free as
that set down by the brush of Ingres--even Aunt Cassie could not
annihilate the glamour of Savina’s legend. For her there was, too,
another, more painful, memory hidden in the knowledge that the parure of
pearls and emeralds and all the other jewels which Savina Pentland had
wrung from her thrifty husband, lay buried somewhere in the white sand
between her bones and those of her cousin. To Aunt Cassie Savina
Pentland seemed more than merely a reckless, extravagant creature. She
was an enemy of the Pentland fortune and of all the virtues of the
family.
The family portraits were of great value to Anson in compiling his book,
for they represented the most complete collection of ancestors existing
in all America. From the portrait of the emigrating Pentland, painted in
a wooden manner by some traveling painter of tavern signs, to the rather
handsome one of John Pentland, painted at middle-age in a pink coat by
Sargent, and the rather bad and liverish one of Anson, also by Mr.
Sargent, the collection was complete save for two--the weak Jared
Pentland who had married Savina, and the Pentland between old John’s
father and the clipper-ship owner, who had died at twenty-three, a
disgraceful thing for any Pentland to have done.
The pictures hung in a neat double row in the lofty hall, arranged
chronologically and without respect for lighting, so that the good ones
like those by Ingres and Sargent’s picture of old John Pentland and the
unfinished Gilbert Stuart of Ashur Pentland hung in obscure shadows, and
the bad ones like the tavern-sign portrait of the first Pentland were
exposed in a glare of brilliant light.
This father of all the family had been painted at the great age of
eighty-nine and looked out from his wooden background, a grim,
hard-mouthed old fellow with white hair and shrewd eyes set very close
together. It was a face such as one might find to-day among the Plymouth
Brethren of some remote, half-forgotten Sussex village, the face of a
man notable only for the toughness of his body and the rigidity of a
mind which dissented from everything. At the age of eighty-four, he had
been cast out for dissension from the church which he had come to regard
as his own property.
Next to him hung the portrait of a Pentland who had been a mediocrity
and left not even a shadowy legend; and then appeared the insolent,
disagreeable face of the Pentland who had ducked eccentric old women for
witches and cut off the ears of peace-loving Quakers in the colony
founded in “freedom to worship God.”
The third Pentland had been the greatest evangelist of his time, a man
who went through New England holding high the torch, exhorting rude
village audiences by the coarsest of language to such a pitch of
excitement that old women died of apoplexy and young women gave birth to
premature children. The sermons which still existed showed him to be a
man uncultivated and at times almost illiterate, yet his vast energy had
founded a university and his fame as an exhorter and “the flaming sword
of the Lord” had traveled to the ignorant and simple-minded brethren of
the English back country.
The next Pentland was the eldest of the exhorter’s twenty children (by
four wives), a man who clearly had departed from his father’s counsels
and appeared in his portrait a sensual, fleshly specimen, very fat and
almost good-natured, with thick red lips. It was this Pentland who had
founded the fortune which gave the family its first step upward in the
direction of the gentility which had ended with the figure of Anson
bending over “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He
had made a large fortune by equipping privateers and practising a
near-piracy on British merchantmen; and there was, too, a dark rumor
(which Anson intended to overlook) that he had made as much as three
hundred per cent profit on a single shipload of negroes in the African
slave trade.
After him there were portraits of two Pentlands who had taken part in
the Revolution and then another hiatus of mediocrity, including the gap
represented by the missing Jared; and then appeared the Anthony Pentland
who increased the fortune enormously in the clipper trade. It was the
portrait of a swarthy, powerful man (the first of the dark Pentlands,
who could all be traced directly to Savina’s Portuguese blood), painted
by a second-rate artist devoted to realism, who had depicted skilfully
the warts which marred the distinguished old gentleman. In the picture
he stood in the garden before the Pentland house at Durham with marshes
in the background and his prize clipper _Semiramis_ riding, with all
sail up, the distant ocean.
Next to him appeared the portrait of old John Pentland’s father--a man
of pious expression, dressed all in black, with a high black stock and a
wave of luxuriant black hair, the one who had raised the family to
really great wealth by contracts for shoes and blankets for the soldiers
at Gettysburg and Bull Run and Richmond. After him, gentility had
conquered completely, and the Sargent portrait of old John Pentland at
middle-age showed a man who was master of hounds and led the life of a
country gentleman, a man clearly of power and character, whose strength
of feature had turned slowly into the bitter hardness of the old man who
sat now in the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or staring before
him into space while his son set down the long history of the family.
The gallery was fascinating to strangers, as the visual record of a
family which had never lost any money (save for the extravagance of
Savina Pentland’s jewels), a family which had been the backbone of a
community, a family in which the men married wives for thrift and
housewifely virtues rather than for beauty, a family solid and
respectable and full of honor. It was a tribe magnificent in its virtue
and its strength, even at times in its intolerance and hypocrisy. It
stood represented now by old John Pentland and Anson, and the boy who
lay abovestairs in the room next Olivia’s, dying slowly.
* * * * *
At ten o’clock each night John Pentland bade them good-night and went
off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and
placing his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia, “I
wouldn’t sit up too late, if I were you, when you are so tired,” left
them and disappeared. Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and
climbed the stairs past all the ancestors.
It was only then, after they had all left her, that a kind of peace
settled over Olivia. The burdens lifted, and the cares, the worries, the
thoughts that were always troubling her, faded into the distance and for
a time she sat leaning back in the winged armchair with her eyes closed,
listening to the sounds of the night--the faint murmur of the breeze in
the faded lilacs outside the window, the creaking that afflicts very old
houses in the night, and sometimes the ominous sound of Miss Egan’s step
traversing distantly the old north wing. And then one night she heard
again the distant sound of Higgins’ voice swearing at the red mare as he
made his round of the stables before going to bed.
And after they had all gone she opened her book and fell to reading,
“_Madame de Clèves ne répondit rien, et elle pensoit avec honte qu’elle
auroit pris tout ce que l’on disoit du changement de ce prince pour des
marques de sa passion, si elle n’avoit point été détrompée. Elle se
sentoit quelque aigreur contre Madame la Dauphine...._” This was a
world in which she felt somehow strangely at peace, as if she had once
lived in it and returned in the silence of the night.
At midnight she closed the book, and making a round of the lower rooms,
put out the lights and went up to the long stairway to listen at the
doorway of her son’s room for the weak, uncertain sound of his
breathing.
2
Olivia was right in her belief that Anson was ashamed of his behavior on
the night of the ball. It was not that he made an apology or even
mentioned the affair. He simply never spoke of it again. For weeks after
the scene he did not mention the name of O’Hara, perhaps because the
name brought up inevitably the memory of his sudden, insulting speech;
but his sense of shame prevented him from harassing her on the subject.
What he never knew was that Olivia, while hating him for the insult
aimed at her father, was also pleased in a perverse, feminine way
because he had displayed for a moment a sudden fit of genuine anger. For
a moment he had come very near to being a husband who might interest his
wife.
But in the end he only sank back again into a sea of indifference so
profound that even Aunt Cassie’s campaign of insinuations and veiled
proposals could not stir him into action. The old woman managed to see
him alone once or twice, saying to him, “Anson, your father is growing
old and can’t manage everything much longer. You must begin to take a
stand yourself. The family can’t rest on the shoulders of a woman.
Besides, Olivia is an outsider, really. She’s never understood our
world.” And then, shaking her head sadly, she would murmur, “There’ll be
trouble, Anson, when your father dies, if you don’t show some backbone.
You’ll have trouble with Sybil, she’s very queer and pig-headed in her
quiet way, just as Olivia was in the matter of sending her to school in
Paris.”
And after a pause, “I am the last person in the world to interfere; it’s
only for your own good and Olivia’s and all the family’s.”
And Anson, to be rid of her, would make promises, facing her with
averted eyes in some corner of the garden or the old house where she had
skilfully run him to earth beyond the possibility of escape. And he
would leave her, troubled and disturbed because the world and this
family which had been saddled unwillingly upon him, would permit him no
peace to go on with his writing. He really hated Aunt Cassie because she
had never given him any peace, never since the days when she had kept
him in the velvet trousers and Fauntleroy curls which spurred the jeers
of the plain, red-haired little Sabine. She had never ceased to reproach
him for “not being a man and standing up for his rights.” It seemed to
him that Aunt Cassie was always hovering near, like a dark persistent
fury, always harassing him; and yet he knew, more by instinct than by
any process of reasoning, that she was his ally against the others, even
his own wife and father and children. He and Aunt Cassie prayed to the
same gods.
So he did nothing, and Olivia, keeping her word, spoke of O’Hara to
Sybil one day as they sat alone at breakfast.
The girl had been riding with him that very morning and she sat in her
riding-clothes, her face flushed by the early morning exercise, telling
her mother of the beauties of the country back of Durham, of the new
beagle puppies, and of the death of “Hardhead” Smith, who was the last
farmer of old New England blood in the county. His half-witted son, she
said, was being taken away to an asylum. O’Hara, she said, was buying
his little stony patch of ground.
When she had finished, her mother said, “And O’Hara? You like him, don’t
you?”
Sybil had a way of looking piercingly at a person, as if her violet eyes
tried to bore quite through all pretense and unveil the truth. She had a
power of honesty and simplicity that was completely disarming, and she
used it now, smiling at her mother, candidly.
“Yes, I like him very much.... But ... but....” She laughed softly. “Are
you worrying about my marrying him, my falling in love--because you
needn’t. I am fond of him because he’s the one person around here who
likes the things I like. He loves riding in the early morning when the
dew is still on the grass and he likes racing with me across the lower
meadow by the gravel-pit, and well--he’s an interesting man. When he
talks, he makes sense. But don’t worry; I shan’t marry him.”
“I _was_ interested,” said Olivia, “because you do see him more than any
one about here.”
Again Sybil laughed. “But he’s old, Mama. He’s more than thirty-five.
He’s middle-aged. I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know
exactly. He’s going to be my own age.”
“One can’t always tell. It’s not so easy as that.”
“I’m sure I can tell.” Her face took on an expression of gravity. “I’ve
devoted a good deal of thought to it and I’ve watched a great many
others.”
Olivia wanted to smile, but she knew she dared not if she were to keep
her hold upon confidences so charming and naïve.
“And I’m sure that I’ll know the man when I see him, right away, at
once. It’ll be like a spark, like my friendship with O’Hara, only deeper
than that.”
“Did you ever talk to Thérèse about love?” asked Olivia.
“No; you can’t talk to her about such things. She wouldn’t understand.
With Thérèse everything is scientific, biological. When Thérèse marries,
I think it will be some man she has picked out as the proper father,
scientifically, for her children.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“She might just have children by him without marrying him, the way she
breeds frogs. I think that’s horrible.”
Again Olivia was seized with an irresistible impulse to laugh, and
controlled herself heroically. She kept thinking of how silly, how
ignorant, she had been at Sybil’s age, silly and ignorant despite the
unclean sort of sophistication she had picked up in the corridors of
Continental hotels. She kept thinking how much better a chance Sybil had
for happiness.... Sybil, sitting there gravely, defending her warm ideas
of romance against the scientific onslaughts of the swarthy, passionate
Thérèse.
“It will be some one like O’Hara,” continued Sybil. “Some one who is
very much alive--only not middle-aged like O’Hara.”
(So Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged, and he was four years
younger than Olivia, who felt and looked so young. The girl kept talking
of O’Hara as if his life were over; but that perhaps was only because
she herself was so young.)
Olivia sighed now, despite herself. “You mustn’t expect too much from
the world, Sybil. Nothing is perfect, not even marriage. One always has
to make compromises.”
“Oh, I know that; I’ve thought a great deal about it. All the same, I’m
sure I’ll know the man when I see him.” She leaned forward and said
earnestly, “Couldn’t you tell when you were a girl?”
“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “I could tell.”
And then, inevitably, Sybil asked what Olivia kept praying she would
not ask. She could hear the girl asking it before the words were spoken.
She knew exactly what she would say.
“Didn’t you know at once when you met Father?”
And in spite of every effort, the faint echo of a sigh escaped Olivia.
“Yes, I knew.”
She saw Sybil give her one of those quick, piercing looks of inquiry and
then bow her head abruptly, as if pretending to study the pattern on her
plate.
When she spoke again, she changed the subject abruptly, so that Olivia
knew she suspected the truth, a thing which she had guarded with a
fierce secrecy for so long.
“Why don’t you take up riding again, Mother?” she asked. “I’d love to
have you go with me. We would go with O’Hara in the mornings, and then
Aunt Cassie couldn’t have anything to say about my getting involved with
him.” She looked up. “You’d like him. You couldn’t help it.”
She saw that Sybil was trying to help her in some way, to divert her and
drive away the unhappiness.
“I like him already,” said Olivia, “very much.”
Then she rose, saying, “I promised Sabine to motor into Boston with her
to-day. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
She went quickly away because she knew it was perilous to sit there any
longer talking of such things while Sybil watched her, eager with the
freshness of youth which has all life before it.
Out of all their talk two things remained distinct in her mind: one that
Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged--almost an old man, for whom
there was no longer any chance of romance; the other the immense
possibility for tragedy that lay before a girl who was so certain that
love would be a glorious romantic affair, so certain of the ideal man
whom she would find one day. What was she to do with Sybil? Where was
she to find that man? And when she found him, what difficulties would
she have to face with John Pentland and Anson and Aunt Cassie and the
host of cousins and connections who would be marshaled to defeat her?
For she saw clearly enough that this youth for whom Sybil was waiting
would never be their idea of a proper match. It would be a man with
qualities which O’Hara possessed, and even Higgins, the groom. She saw
perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders; she had come
to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a
curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked,
and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor
tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty
affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat.
They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings. O’Hara,
with his career and his energy, and Higgins, with his rabbitlike
love-affairs and his nearness to all that was earthy, still carried
about them a sense of the great zest in life. They reached down somehow
into the roots of things where there was still savor and fertility.
And as she walked along the hallway, she found herself laughing aloud
over the titles of the only three books which the Pentland family had
ever produced--“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony”
and Mr. Struthers’ two books, “Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks
and Talks in New England Churchyards.” She thought suddenly of what
Sabine had once said acidly of New England--that it was a place where
thoughts were likely to grow “higher and fewer.”
But she was frightened, too, because in the life of enchantment which
surrounded her, the virtues of O’Hara and Higgins seemed to her the only
things in the world worth possessing. She wanted desperately to be
alive, as she had never been, and she knew that this, too, was what
Sybil sought in all her groping, half-blind romantic youth. It was
something which the girl sensed and had never clearly understood,
something which she knew existed and was awaiting her.
3
Sabine, watching O’Hara as he crossed the fields through the twilight,
had penetrated in a sudden flash of intuition the depths of his
character. His profound loneliness was, perhaps, the key which unlocked
the whole of his soul, a key which Sabine knew well enough, for there
had never been a time in all her existence, save for a sudden passionate
moment or two in the course of her life with Callendar, when she was
free of a painful feeling that she was alone. Even with her own
daughter, the odd Thérèse, she was lonely. Watching life with the same
passionate intensity with which she had watched the distant figure of
O’Hara moving away against the horizon, she had come long ago to
understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of
all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity.
Looking about her she saw that old John Pentland was lonely, and Olivia,
and even her own daughter Thérèse, rambling off independently across the
marshes in search of bugs and queer plants. She saw that Anson Pentland
was never lonely, for he had his friends who were so like him as to be
very nearly indistinguishable, and he had all the traditions and
fetishes which he shared with Aunt Cassie. They were part of a fabric, a
small corner in the whole tapestry of life, from which they were
inseparable.
Of them all, it seemed to her, as she came to see more and more of
O’Hara, that he was the most lonely. He had friends, scores, even
hundreds of them, in a dozen circles, ranging from the docks where he
had spent his boyhood to the world about Durham where there were others
who treated him less coldly than the Pentland family had done. He had
friends because there was a quality about him which was irresistible. It
lurked somewhere in the depths of the humorous blue eyes and at the
corners of the full, rather sensual mouth--a kind of universal sympathy
which made him understand the fears, the hopes, the ambitions, the
weaknesses of other people. It was that quality, so invaluable in
politics, which led enemies unjustly to call him all things to all
people. He must have had the gift of friendship, for there were whole
sections of Boston which would have followed him anywhere; and yet
behind these easy, warm ties there was always a sort of veil shutting
him away from them. He had a way of being at home in a barroom or at a
hunt breakfast with equal ease, but there was a part of him--the part
which was really O’Hara--which the world never saw at all, a strangely
warm, romantic, impractical, passionate, headlong, rather unscrupulous
Irishman, who lay shut away where none could penetrate. Sabine knew this
O’Hara; he had been revealed to her swiftly in a sudden flash at the
mention of Olivia Pentland. And afterward when she thought of it, she
(Sabine Callendar), who was so hard, so bitter, so unbelieving,
surrendered to him as so many had done before her.
Standing there in her sitting-room, so big and powerful and
self-reliant, he had seemed suddenly like a little boy, like the little
boy whom she had found once late at night long ago, sitting alone and
quite still on the curb in front of her house in the Rue de Tilsitt. She
had stopped for a moment and watched him, and presently she had
approached and asked, “What are you doing here on the curb at this hour
of the night?” And the little boy, looking up, had said gravely, “I’m
playing.”
It had happened years ago--the little boy must have grown into a young
man by now--but she remembered him suddenly during the moment when
O’Hara had turned and said to her, “It will mean a great deal to me,
more than you can imagine.”
O’Hara was like that, she knew--sad and a little lonely, as if in the
midst of all his success, with his career and his big new house and his
dogs and horses and all the other shiny accoutrements of a gentleman, he
had looked up at her and said gravely, “I’m playing.”
Long ago Sabine had come to understand that one got a savor out of life
by casting overboard all the little rules which clutter up existence,
all the ties, and beliefs and traditions in which she had been given a
training so intense and severe that in the end she had turned a rebel.
Behind all the indifference of countenance and the intricacy of brain,
there lay a foundation of immense candor which had driven her to seek
her companions, with the directness of an arrow, only among the persons
whom she had come to designate as “complete.” It was a label which she
did not trouble to define to any one, doubting perhaps that any one save
herself would find any interest in it; even for herself, it was a label
lacking in definiteness. Vaguely she meant by “complete” the persons who
stood on their own, who had an existence sufficiently strong to survive
the assault or the collapse of any environment, persons who might exist
independent of any concrete world, who possessed a proud sense of
individuality, who might take root and work out a successful destiny
wherever fate chanced to drop them. They were rare, she had come to
discover, and yet they existed everywhere, such persons as John Pentland
and O’Hara, Olivia and Higgins.
So she had come to seek her life among them, drawing them quietly about
her wherever in the world she happened to pause for a time. She did it
quietly and without loud cries of “Freedom” and “Free Love” and “The
Right to Lead One’s Life,” for she was enough civilized to understand
the absurdity of making a spectacle in the market-place, and she was too
intense an individualist ever to turn missionary. Here perhaps lay her
quiet strength and the source of that vague distrust and uneasiness
which her presence created in people like Anson and Aunt Cassie. It was
unbearable for Aunt Cassie to suspect that Sabine really did not trouble
even to scorn her, unbearable to an old woman who had spent all her life
in arranging the lives of others to find that a chit of a woman like
Sabine could discover in her only a subject of mingled mirth and pity.
It was unbearable not to have the power of jolting Sabine out of her
serene and insolent indifference, unbearable to know that she was always
watching you out of those green eyes, turning you over and over as if
you were a bug and finding you in the end an inferior sort of insect.
Those who had shared the discovery of her secret were fond of her, and
those who had not were bitter against her. And it was, after all, a very
simple secret, that one has only to be simple and friendly and human and
“complete.” She had no patience with sentimentality, and affectation and
false piety.
And so the presence of Sabine began slowly to create a vaguely defined
rift in a world hitherto set and complacent and even proud of itself.
Something in the sight of her cold green eyes, in the sound of her
metallic voice, in the sudden shrewd, disillusioning observations which
she had a way of making at disconcerting moments, filled people like
Aunt Cassie with uneasiness and people like Olivia with a smoldering
sense of restlessness and rebellion. Olivia herself became more and more
conscious of the difference with the passing of each day into the next
and there were times when she suspected that that fierce old man, her
father-in-law, was aware of it. It was potent because Sabine was no
outsider; the mockery of an outsider would have slipped off the back of
the Durham world like arrows off the back of an armadillo. But Sabine
was one of them: it was that which made the difference: she was always
inside the shell.
4
One hot, breathless night in June Sabine overcame her sense of bored
indolence enough to give a dinner at Brook Cottage--a dinner well
served, with delicious food, which it might have been said she flung at
her guests with a superb air of indifference from the seat at the head
of the table, where she sat painted, ugly and magnificently dressed,
watching them all in a perverse sort of pleasure. It was a failure as an
entertainment, for it had been years since Sabine had given a dinner
where the guests were not clever enough to entertain themselves, and now
that she was back again in a world where people were invited for every
sort of reason save that you really wanted their company, she declined
to make any effort. It was a failure, too, because Thérèse, for whom it
was given, behaved exactly as she had behaved on the night of the ball.
There was an uneasiness and a strain, a sense of awkwardness among the
callow young men and a sense of weariness in Sabine and Olivia. O’Hara
was there, for Sabine had kept her half-promise; but even he sat
quietly, all his boldness and dash vanished before a boyish shyness. The
whole affair seemed to be drowned in the lassitude, the enchantment that
enveloped the old house on the other bank of the river.
Olivia had come, almost against her will, reduced to a state of
exhaustion after a long call from Aunt Cassie on the subject of the
rumored affair between Sybil and their Irish neighbor. And when they
rose, she slipped quietly away into the garden, because she could not
bear the thought of making strained and artificial conversation. She
wanted, horribly, to be left in peace.
It was a superb night--hot, as a summer night should be--but clear, too,
so that the whole sky was like a sapphire dome studded with diamonds. At
the front of the cottage, beyond the borders of the little terraced
garden, the marshes spread their dark carpet toward the distant dunes,
which with the descent of darkness had turned dim and blue against the
purer white of the line made by the foaming surf. The feel of the damp
thick grass against the sole of her silver slippers led her to stop for
a moment, breathing deeply, and filled her with a mild, half-mystical
desire to blend herself into all the beauty that surrounded her, into
the hot richness of the air, the scents of the opening blossoms and of
pushing green stems, into the grass and the sea and the rich-smelling
marshes, to slip away into a state which was nothing and yet everything,
to float into eternity. She had abruptly an odd, confused sense of the
timelessness of all these forces and sensations, of the sea and the
marshes, the pushing green Stems and the sapphire dome powdered with
diamonds above her head. She saw for the first time in all her existence
the power of something which went on and on, ignoring pitiful small
creatures like herself and all those others in the cottage behind her, a
power which ignored cities and armies and nations, which would go on and
on long after the grass had blanketed the ruins of the old house at
Pentland. It was sweeping past her, leaving her stranded somewhere in
the dull backwaters. She wanted suddenly, fiercely, to take part in all
the great spectacle of eternal fertility, a mystery which was stronger
than any of them or all of them together, a force which in the end would
crush all their transient little prides and beliefs and traditions.
And then she thought, as if she were conscious of it for the first time,
“I am tired, tired to death, and a little mad.”
Moving across the damp grass she seated herself on a stone bench which
O’Hara had placed beneath one of the ancient apple-trees left standing
from the orchard which had covered all the land about Brook Cottage in
the days when Savina Pentland was still alive; and for a long time (she
never knew how long) she remained there lost in one of those strange
lapses of consciousness when one is neither awake nor asleep but in the
vague borderland where there is no thought, no care, no troubles. And
then slowly she became aware of some one standing there quite near her,
beneath the ancient, gnarled tree. As if the presence were materialized
somehow out of a dream, she noticed first the faint, insinuating
masculine odor of cigar-smoke blending itself with the scent of the
growing flowers in Sabine’s garden, and then turning she saw a black
figure which she recognized at once as that of O’Hara. There was no
surprise in the sight of him; it seemed in a queer way as if she had
been expecting him.
As she turned, he moved toward her and spoke. “Our garden has
flourished, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You’d never think it was only a year
old.”
“Yes,” she said. “It has flourished marvelously.” And then, after a
little pause, “How long have you been standing there?”
“Only a moment. I saw you come out of the house.” They listened for a
time to the distant melancholy pounding of the surf, and presently he
said softly, with a kind of awe in his voice: “It is a marvelous night
... a night full of splendor.”
She made an effort to answer him, but somehow she could think of nothing
to say. The remark, uttered so quietly, astonished her, because she had
never thought of O’Hara as one who would be sensitive to the beauty of a
night. It was too dark to distinguish his face, but she kept seeing him
as she remembered him, seeing him, too, as the others thought of
him--rough and vigorous but a little common, with the scar on his
temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so
unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might
as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: “It is a night
full of splendor.” The men she knew--Anson’s friends--never said such
things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if
they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done
anything so unusual.
“The party is not a great success,” he was saying.
“No.”
“No one seems to be getting on with any one else. Mrs. Callendar ought
not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that.”
Olivia laughed softly. “She may have done it on purpose. You can never
tell why she does anything.”
For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he
said, “You aren’t cold out here?”
“No, not on a night like this.”
There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the
need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were
two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the
garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.
“I keep wondering,” she said, “how long it will be until the bungalows
of Durham creep down and cover all this land.”
“They won’t, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea.”
In the darkness she smiled at the thought of an Irish Roman Catholic
politician as the protector of this old New England countryside, and
aloud she said, “You’re growing to be like all the others. You want to
make the world stand still.”
“Yes, I can see that it must seem funny to you.” There was no
bitterness in his voice, but only a sort of hurt, which again astonished
her, because it was impassible to think of O’Hara as one who could be
hurt.
“There will always be the Pentland house, but, of course, all of us will
die some day and then what?”
“There will always be our children.”
She was aware slowly of slipping back into that world of cares and
troubles behind her from which she had escaped a little while before.
She said, “_You_ are looking a long way into the future.”
“Perhaps, but I mean to have children one day. And at Pentlands there is
always Sybil, who will fight for it fiercely. She’ll never give it up.”
“But it’s Jack who will own it, and I’m not so sure about him.”
Unconsciously she sighed, knowing now that she was pretending again,
being dishonest. She was pretending again that Jack would live to have
Pentlands for his own, that he would one day have children who would
carry it on. She kept saying to herself, “It is only the truth that can
save us all.” And she knew that O’Hara understood her feeble game of
pretending. She knew because he stood there silently, as if Jack were
already dead, as if he understood the reason for the faint bitter sigh
and respected it.
“You see a great deal of Sybil, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, she is a good girl. One can depend on her.”
“Perhaps if she had a little of Thérèse or Mrs. Callendar in her, she’d
be safer from being hurt.”
He did not answer her at once, but she knew that in the darkness he was
standing there, watching her.
“But that was a silly thing to say,” she murmured. “I don’t suppose you
know what I mean.”
He answered her quickly. “I do know exactly. I know and I’m sure Mrs.
Callendar knows. We’ve both learned to save ourselves--not in the same
school, but the same lesson, nevertheless. But as to Sybil, I think that
depends upon whom she marries.”
(“So now,” thought Olivia, “it is coming. It is Sybil whom he loves. He
wants to marry her. That is why he has followed me out here.”) She was
back again now, solidly enmeshed in all the intricacies of living. She
had a sudden, shameful, twinge of jealousy for Sybil, who was so young,
who had pushed her so completely into the past along with all the others
at Pentlands.
“I was wondering,” she said, “whether she was not seeing too much of
you, whether she might not be a bother.”
“No, she’ll never be that.” And then in a voice which carried a faint
echo of humor, he added, “I know that in a moment you are going to ask
my intentions.”
“No,” she said, “no”; but she could think of nothing else to say. She
felt suddenly shy and awkward and a little idiotic, like a young girl at
her first dance.
“I shall tell you what my intentions are,” he was saying, and then he
broke off suddenly. “Why is it so impossible to be honest in this world,
when we live such a little while? It would be such a different place if
we were all honest wouldn’t it?”
He hesitated, waiting for her to answer, and she said, “Yes,” almost
mechanically, “very different.”
When he replied there was a faint note of excitement in his voice. It
was pitched a little lower and he spoke more quickly. In the darkness
she could not see him, and yet she was sharply conscious of the change.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he was saying, “I’ve been seeing a great deal of
Sybil in the hope that I should see a little of her mother.”
She did not answer him. She simply sat there, speechless, overcome by
confusion, as if she had been a young girl with her first lover. She
was even made a little dizzy by the sound of his voice.
“I have offended you. I’m sorry. I only spoke the truth. There is no
harm in that.”
With a heroic effort to speak intelligently, she succeeded in saying,
“No, I am not offended.” (It all seemed such a silly, helpless, pleasant
feeling.) “No, I’m not offended. I don’t know....”
Of only one thing was she certain; that this strange, dizzy, intoxicated
state was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was sinister and
overwhelming in a bitter-sweet fashion. She kept thinking, “I can begin
to understand how a young girl can be seduced, how she cannot know what
she is doing.”
“I suppose,” he was saying, “that you think me presumptuous.”
“No, I only think everything is impossible, insane.”
“You think me a kind of ruffian, a bum, an Irishman, a Roman Catholic,
some one you have never heard of.” He waited, and then added: “I _am_
all that, from one point of view.”
“No, I don’t think that; I don’t think that.”
He sat down beside her quietly on the stone bench. “You have every right
to think it,” he continued softly. “Every right in the world, and still
things like that make no difference, nothing makes any difference.”
“My father,” she said softly, “was a man very like you. His enemies
sometimes used to call him ‘shanty Irish.’...”
She knew all the while that she should have risen and sought indignant
refuge in the house. She knew that perhaps she was being absurd, and yet
she stayed there quietly. She was so tired and she had waited for so
long (she only knew it now in a sudden flash) to have some one talk to
her in just this way, as if she were a woman. She needed some one to
lean upon, so desperately.
“How can you know me?” she asked out of a vague sense of helplessness.
“How can you know anything about me?”
He did not touch her. He only sat there in the darkness, making her feel
by a sort of power which was too strong for her, that all he said was
terribly the truth.
“I know, I know, all about you, everything. I’ve watched you. I’ve
understood you, even better than the others. A man whose life has been
like mine sees and understands a great deal that others never notice
because for him everything depends upon a kind of second sight. It’s the
one great weapon of the opportunist.” There was a silence and he asked,
“Can you understand that? It may be hard, because your life has been so
different.”
“Not so different, as you might think, only perhaps I’ve made more of a
mess of it.” And straightening her body, she murmured, “It is foolish of
me to let you talk this way.”
He interrupted her with a quick burst of almost boyish eagerness. “But
you’re glad, aren’t you? You’re glad, all the same, whether you care
anything for me or not. You’ve deserved it for a long time.”
She began to cry softly, helplessly, without a sound, the tears running
down her cheeks, and she thought, “Now I’m being a supreme fool. I’m
pitying myself.” But she could not stop.
It appeared that even in the darkness he was aware of her tears, for he
chose not to interrupt them. They sat thus for a long time in silence,
Olivia conscious with a terrible aching acuteness, of the beauty of the
night and finding it all strange and unreal and confused.
“I wanted you to know,” he said quietly, “that there was some one near
you, some one who worships you, who would give up everything for you.”
And after a time, “Perhaps we had better go in now. You can go in
through the piazza and powder your nose. I’ll go in through the door
from the garden.”
And as they walked across the damp, scented grass, he said, “It would be
pleasant if you would join Sybil and me riding in the morning.”
“But I haven’t been on a horse in years,” said Olivia.
* * * * *
Throughout the rest of the evening, while she sat playing bridge with
Sabine and O’Hara and the Mannering boy, her mind kept straying from the
game into unaccustomed by-ways. It was not, she told herself, that she
was even remotely in love with O’Hara; it was only that some one--a man
who was no creature of ordinary attractions--had confessed his
admiration for her, and so she felt young and giddy and elated. The
whole affair was silly ... and yet, yet, in a strange way, it was not
silly at all. She kept thinking of Anson’s remarks about his father and
old Mrs. Soames, “It’s a silly affair”--and of Sybil saying gravely,
“Only not middle-aged, like O’Hara,” and it occurred to her at the same
time that in all her life she felt really young for the first time. She
had been young as she sat on the stone bench under the ancient
apple-tree, young in spite of everything.
And aloud she would say, “Four spades,” and know at once that she should
have made no such bid.
She was unnerved, too, by the knowledge that there were, all the while,
two pairs of eyes far more absorbed in her than in the game of
bridge--the green ones of Sabine and the bright blue ones of O’Hara. She
could not look up without encountering the gaze of one or the other; and
to protect herself she faced them with a hard, banal little smile which
she put in place in the mechanical way used by Miss Egan. It was the
sort of smile which made her face feel very tired, and for the first
time she had a half-comic flash of pity for Miss Egan. The face of the
nurse must at times have grown horribly tired.
* * * * *
The giddiness still clung to her as she climbed into the motor beside
Sybil and they drove off down the lane which led from Brook Cottage to
Pentlands. The road was a part of a whole tracery of lanes, bordered by
hedges and old trees, which bound together the houses of the
countryside, and at night they served as a promenade and meeting-place
for the servants of the same big houses. One came upon them in little
groups of three or four, standing by gates or stone walls, gossiping and
giggling together in the darkness, exchanging tales of the life that
passed in the houses of their masters, stories of what the old man did
yesterday, and how Mrs. So-and-so only took one bath a week. There was a
whole world which lay beneath the solid, smooth, monotonous surface that
shielded the life of the wealthy, a world which in its way was full of
mockery and dark secrets and petty gossip, a world perhaps fuller of
truth because it lay hidden away where none--save perhaps Aunt Cassie,
who knew how many fascinating secrets servants had--ever looked, and
where there was small need for the sort of pretense which Olivia found
so tragic. It circulated the dark lanes at night after the dinners of
the neighborhood were finished, and sometimes the noisy echoes of its
irreverent mockery rose in wild Irish laughter that echoed back and
forth across the mist-hung meadows.
The same lanes were frequented, too, by lovers, who went in pairs
instead of groups of three or four, and at times there were echoes of a
different sort of merriment--the wild, half-hysterical laughter of some
kitchen-maid being wooed roughly and passionately in some dark corner by
a groom or a house-servant. It was a world which blossomed forth only
at nightfall. Sometimes in the darkness the masters, motoring home from
a ball or a dinner, would come upon an amorous couple, bathed in the
sudden brilliant glare of motor-lights, sitting with their arms about
each other against a tree, or lying half-hidden among a tangle of
hawthorn and elder-bushes.
To-night, as Olivia and Sybil drove in silence along the road, the hot
air was filled with the thick scent of the hawthorn-blossoms and the
rich, dark odor of cattle, blown toward them across the meadows by the
faint salt breeze from the marshes. It was late and the lights of the
motor encountered no strayed lovers until at the foot of the hill by the
old bridge the glare illuminated suddenly the figures of a man and a
woman seated together against the stone wall. At their approach the
woman slipped quickly over the wall, and the man, following, leaped
lightly as a goat to the top and into the field beyond. Sybil laughed
and murmured, “It’s Higgins again.”
It _was_ Higgins. There was no mistaking the stocky, agile figure clad
in riding-breeches and sleeveless cotton shirt, and as he leaped the
wall the sight of him aroused in Olivia a nebulous, fleeting impression
that was like a half-forgotten memory. A startled fawn, she thought,
must have scuttled off into the bushes in the same fashion. And she had
suddenly that same strange, prickly feeling of terror that had affected
Sabine on the night she discovered him hidden in the lilacs watching the
ball.
She shivered, and Sybil asked, “You’re not cold?”
“No.”
She was thinking of Higgins and hoping that this was not the beginning
of some new scrape. Once before a girl had come to her in trouble--a
Polish girl, whom she helped and sent away because she could not see
that forcing Higgins to marry her would have brought anything but
misery for both of them. It never ceased to amaze her that a man so
gnarled and ugly, such a savage, hairy little man as Higgins, should
have half the girls of the countryside running after him.
* * * * *
In her own room she listened in the darkness until she heard the sound
of Jack’s gentle breathing and then, after undressing, she sat for a
long time at the window looking out across the meadows toward the
marshes. There was a subdued excitement which seemed to run through all
her body and would not let her sleep. She no longer felt the weariness
of spirit which had let her slip during these last few months into a
kind of lethargy. She was alive, more alive than she had ever been, even
as a young girl; her cheeks were hot and flushed, so that she placed her
white hands against them to feel a coolness that was missing from the
night air; but they, too, were hot with life.
And as she sat there, the sounds from Sybil’s room across the hall died
away and at last the night grew still save for the sound of her son’s
slow breathing and the familiar ghostly creakings of the old house. She
was alone now, the only one who was not sleeping; and sitting above the
mist-hung meadows she grew more quiet. The warm rich scents of the night
drifted in at the window, and again she became aware of a kind of
voluptuousness which she had sensed in the air as she sat, hours
earlier, on Sabine’s terrace above the sea. It had assailed her again as
they drove through the lane across the low, marshy pastures by the
river. And then in the figure of Higgins, leaping the wall like a goat,
it had come with a shock to a sudden climax of feeling, with a sudden
acuteness which even terrified her. It still persisted a little, the odd
feeling of some tremendous, powerful force at work all about her,
moving swiftly and quietly, thrusting aside and annihilating those who
opposed it.
She thought again, “I am a little mad to-night. What has come over me?”
And she grew frightened, though it was a different sort of terror from
that which afflicted her at the odd moments when she felt all about her
the presence of the dead who lived on and on at Pentlands. What she knew
now was no terror of the dead; it was rather a terror of warm,
passionate life. She thought, “This is what must have happened to the
others. This is how they must have felt before they died.”
It was not physical death that she meant, but a death somehow of the
soul, a death which left behind it such withered people as Aunt Cassie
and Anson, the old woman in the north wing, and even a man so rugged and
powerful as John Pentland, who had struggled so much more fiercely than
the others. And she got a sudden sense of being caught between two dark,
struggling forces in fierce combat. It was confused and vague, yet it
made her feel suddenly ill in a physical sense. The warm feeling of life
and excitement flowed away, leaving her chilled and relaxed, weary all
at once, and filled with a soft lassitude, still looking out into the
night, still smelling the thick odor of cattle and hawthorn-blossoms.
* * * * *
She never knew whether or not she had fallen asleep in the bergère by
the window, but she did know that she was roused abruptly by the sound
of footsteps. Outside the door of her room, in the long hallway, there
was some one walking, gently, cautiously. It was not this time merely
the creaking of the old house; it was the sound of footfalls, regular,
measured, inevitable, those of some person of almost no weight at all.
She listened, and slowly, cautiously, almost as if the person were blind
and groping his way in the darkness, the step advanced until presently
it came opposite her and thin slivers of light outlined the door that
led into the hall. Quietly she rose and, still lost in a vague sense of
moving in a nightmare, she went over to the door and opened it. Far down
the long hall, at the door which opened into the stairway leading to the
attic of the house, there was a small circle of light cast by an
electric torch. It threw into a black silhouette the figure of an old
woman with white hair whom Olivia recognized at once. It was the old
woman escaped from the north wing. While she stood watching her, the
figure, fumbling at the door, opened it and disappeared quickly into the
stairway.
There was no time to be lost, not time even to go in search of the
starched Miss Egan. The poor creature might fling herself from the upper
windows. So, without stopping even to throw a dressing-gown about her,
Olivia went quickly along the dark hall and up the stairway where the
fantastic creature in the flowered wrapper had vanished.
The attic was an enormous, unfinished room that covered the whole of the
house, a vast cavern of a place, empty save for a few old trunks and
pieces of broken furniture. The flotsam and jetsam of Pentland life had
been stowed away there, lost and forgotten in the depths of the big
room, for more than a century. No one entered it. Since Sybil and Jack
had grown, it remained half-forgotten. They had played there on rainy
days as small children, and before them Sabine and Anson had played in
the same dark, mysterious corners among broken old trunks and sofas and
chairs.
Olivia found the place in darkness save for the patches of blue light
where the luminous night came in at the double row of dormer windows,
and at the far end, by a group of old trunks, the circle of light from
the torch that moved this way and that, as if old Mrs. Pentland were
searching for something. In the haste of her escape and flight, her
thin white hair had come undone and fell about her shoulders. A sickly
smell of medicine hung about her.
Olivia touched her gently and said, “What have you lost, Mrs. Pentland?
Can I help you?”
The old woman turned and, throwing the light of the torch full into
Olivia’s face, stared at her with the round blue eyes, murmuring, “Oh,
it’s you, Olivia. Then it’s all right. Perhaps you can help me.”
“What was it you lost? We might look for it in the morning.”
“I’ve forgotten what it was now. You startled me, and you know my poor
brain isn’t very good, at best. It never has been since I married.”
Sharply she looked at Olivia. “It didn’t affect you that way, did it?
You don’t ever drift away and feel yourself growing dimmer and dimmer,
do you? It’s odd. Perhaps it’s different with your husband.”
Olivia saw that the old woman was having one of those isolated moments
of clarity and reason which were more horrible than her insanity because
for a time she made you see that, after all, she was like yourself,
human and capable of thought. To Olivia these moments were almost as if
she witnessed the rising of the dead.
“No,” said Olivia. “Perhaps if we went to bed now, you’d remember in the
morning.”
Old Mrs. Pentland shook her head violently. “No, no, I must find them
now. It may be all different in the morning and I won’t know anything
and that Irish woman won’t let me out. Say over the names of a few
things like prunes, prisms, persimmons. That’s what Mr. Dickens used to
have his children do when he couldn’t think of a word.”
“Let me have the light,” said Olivia; “perhaps I can find what it is you
want.”
With the meekness of a child, the old woman gave her the electric torch
and Olivia, turning it this way and that, among the trunks and old
rubbish, made a mock search among the doll-houses and the toy dishes
left scattered in the corner of the attic where the children had played
house for the last time.
While she searched, the old woman kept up a running comment, half to
herself: “It’s something I wanted to find very much. It’ll make a great
difference here in the lives of all of us. I thought I might find Sabine
here to help me. She was here yesterday morning, playing with Anson. It
rained all day and they couldn’t go out. I hid it here yesterday when I
came up to see them.”
Olivia again attempted wheedling.
“It’s late now, Mrs. Pentland. We ought both to be in bed. You try to
remember what it is you want, and in the morning I’ll come up and find
it for you.”
For a moment the old woman considered this, and at last she said, “You
wouldn’t give it to me if you found it. I’m sure you wouldn’t. You’re
too afraid of them all.”
“I promise you I will. You can trust me, can’t you?”
“Yes, yes, you’re the only one who doesn’t treat me as if I wasn’t quite
bright. Yes, I think I can trust you.” Another thought occurred to her
abruptly. “But I wouldn’t remember again. I might forget. Besides, I
don’t think Miss Egan would let me.”
Olivia took one of the thin old hands in hers and said, as if she were
talking to a little child, “I know what we’ll do. To-morrow you write it
out on a bit of paper and then I’ll find it and bring it to you.”
“I’m sure little Sabine could find it,” said the old woman. “She’s very
good at such things. She’s such a clever child.”
“I’ll go over and fetch Sabine to have her help me.”
The old woman looked at her sharply. “You’ll promise that?” she asked.
“You’ll promise?”
“Of course, surely.”
“Because all the others are always deceiving me.”
And then quite gently she allowed herself to be led across the moonlit
patches of the dusty floor, down the stairs and back to her room. In the
hall of the north wing they came suddenly upon the starched Miss Egan,
all her starch rather melted and subdued now, her red face purple with
alarm.
“I’ve been looking for her everywhere, Mrs. Pentland,” she told Olivia.
“I don’t know how she escaped. She was asleep when I left. I went down
to the kitchen for her orange-juice, and while I was gone she
disappeared.”
It was the old woman who answered. Looking gravely at Olivia, she said,
with an air of confidence, “You know I never speak to her at all. She’s
common. She’s a common Irish servant. They can shut me up with her, but
they can’t make me speak to her.” And then she began to drift back again
into the hopeless state that was so much more familiar. She began to
mumble over and over again a chain of words and names which had no
coherence.
Olivia and Miss Egan ignored her, as if part of her--the vaguely
_rational_ old woman--had disappeared, leaving in her place this pitiful
chattering creature who was a stranger.
Olivia explained where it was she found the old woman and why she had
gone there.
“She’s been talking on the subject for days,” said Miss Egan. “I think
it’s letters that she’s looking for, but it may be nothing at all. She
mixes everything terribly.”
Olivia was shivering now in her nightdress, more from weariness and
nerves than from the chill of the night.
“I wouldn’t speak of it to any of the others, Miss Egan,” she said. “It
will only trouble them. And we must be more careful about her in the
future.”
The old woman had gone past them now, back into the dark room where she
spent her whole life, and the nurse had begun to recover a little of her
defiant confidence. She even smiled, the hard, glittering smile which
always said, “You cannot do without me, whatever happens.”
Aloud she said, “I can’t imagine what happened, Mrs. Pentland.”
“It was an accident, never mind,” said Olivia. “Good-night. Only I think
it’s better not to speak of what has happened. It will only alarm the
others.”
But she was puzzled, Olivia, because underneath the dressing-gown Miss
Egan had thrown about her shoulders she saw that the nurse was dressed
neither in night-clothes nor in her uniform, but in the suit of blue
serge that she wore on the rare occasions when she went into the city.
5
She spoke to no one of what had happened, either on the terrace or in
the lane or in the depths of the old attic, and the days came to resume
again their old monotonous round, as if the strange, hot, disturbing
night had had no more existence than a dream. She did not see O’Hara,
yet she heard of him, constantly, from Sybil, from Sabine, even from
Jack, who seemed stronger than he had ever been and able for a time to
go about the farm with his grandfather in the trap drawn by an old white
horse. There were moments when it seemed to Olivia that the boy might
one day be really well, and yet there was never any real joy in those
moments, because always in the back of her mind stood the truth. She
knew it would never be, despite all that fierce struggle which she and
the old man kept up perpetually against the thing which was stronger
than either of them. Indeed, she even found a new sort of sadness in the
sight of the pale thin boy and the rugged old man driving along the
lanes in the trap, the eyes of the grandfather bright with a look of
deluding hope. It was a look which she found unbearable because it was
the first time in years, almost since that first day when Jack, as a
tiny baby who did not cry enough, came into the world, that the
expression of the old man had changed from one of grave and
uncomplaining resignation.
Sometimes when she watched them together she was filled with a fierce
desire to go to John Pentland and tell him that it was not her fault
that there were not more children, other heirs to take the place of
Jack. She wanted to tell him that she would have had ten children if it
were possible, that even now she was still young enough to have more
children. She wanted to pour out to him something of that hunger of life
which had swept over her on the night in Sabine’s garden beneath the
apple-tree, a spot abounding in fertility. But she knew, too, how
impossible it was to discuss a matter which old John Pentland, in the
depths of his soul believed to be “indelicate.” Such things were all
hidden behind a veil which shut out so much of truth from all their
lives. There were times when she fancied he understood it all, those
times when he took her hand and kissed her affectionately. She fancied
that he understood and that the knowledge lay somehow at the root of the
old man’s quiet contempt for his own son.
But she saw well enough the tragedy that lay deep down at the root of
the whole matter. She understood that it was not Anson who was to blame.
It was that they had all been caught in the toils of something stronger
than any of them, a force which with a cruel injustice compelled her to
live a dry, monotonous, barren existence when she would have embraced
life passionately, which compelled her to watch her own son dying slowly
before her eyes.
Always she came back to the same thought, that the boy must be kept
alive until his grandfather was dead; and sometimes, standing on the
terrace, looking out across the fields, Olivia saw that old Mrs.
Soames, dressed absurdly in pink, with a large picture-hat, was riding
in the trap with the old man and his grandson, as if in reality she were
the grandmother of Jack instead of the mad old woman abovestairs.
The days came to resume their round of dull monotony, and yet there was
a difference, odd and indefinable, as if in some way the sun were
brighter than it had been, as if those days, when even in the bright
sunlight the house had seemed a dull gray place, were gone now. She
could no longer look across the meadows toward the bright new chimneys
of O’Hara’s house without a sudden quickening of breath, a warm pleasant
sensation of no longer standing quite alone.
She was not even annoyed any longer by the tiresome daily visits of Aunt
Cassie, nor by the old woman’s passion for pitying her and making wild
insinuations against Sabine and O’Hara and complaining of Sybil riding
with him in the mornings over the dew-covered fields. She was able now
simply to sit there politely as she had once done, listening while the
old woman talked on and on; only now she did not even listen with
attention. It seemed to her at times that Aunt Cassie was like some
insect beating itself frantically against a pane of glass, trying over
and over again with an unflagging futility to enter where it was
impossible to enter.
It was Sabine who gave her a sudden glimpse of penetration into this
instinct about Aunt Cassie, Sabine who spent all her time finding out
about people. It happened one morning that the two clouds of dust, the
one made by Aunt Cassie and the other by Sabine, met at the very foot of
the long drive leading up to Pentlands, and together the two women--one
dressed severely in shabby black, without so much as a fleck of powder
on her nose, the other dressed expensively in what some Paris dressmaker
chose to call a _costume de sport_, with her face made up like a
Parisian--arrived together to sit on the piazza of Pentlands insulting
each other subtly for an hour. When at last Sabine managed to outstay
Aunt Cassie (it was always a contest between them, for each knew that
the other would attack her as soon as she was out of hearing) she turned
to Olivia and said abruptly, “I’ve been thinking about Aunt Cassie, and
I’m sure now of one thing. Aunt Cassie is a virgin!”
There was something so cold-blooded and sudden in the statement that
Olivia laughed.
“I’m sure of it,” persisted Sabine with quiet seriousness. “Look at her.
She’s always talking about the tragedy of her being too frail ever to
have had children. She never tried. That’s the answer. She never tried.”
Sabine tossed away what remained of the cigarette she had lighted to
annoy Aunt Cassie, and continued. “You never knew my Uncle Ned Struthers
when he was young. You only knew him as an old man with no spirit left.
But he wasn’t that way always. It’s what she did to him. She destroyed
him. He was a full-blooded kind of man who liked drinking and horses and
he must have liked women, too, but she cured him of that. He would have
liked children, but instead of a wife he only got a woman who couldn’t
bear the thought of not being married and yet couldn’t bear what
marriage meant. He got a creature who fainted and wept and lay on a sofa
all day, who got the better of him because he was a nice, stupid,
chivalrous fellow.”
Sabine was launched now with all the passion which seized her when she
had laid bare a little patch of life and examined it minutely.
“He didn’t even dare to be unfaithful to her. If he looked at another
woman she fainted and became deathly ill and made terrible scenes. I can
remember some of them. I remember that once he called on Mrs. Soames
when she was young and beautiful, and when he came home Aunt Cassie met
him in hysterics and told him that if it ever happened again she would
go out, ‘frail and miserable as she was,’ and commit adultery. I
remember the story because I overheard my father telling it when I was a
child and I was miserable until I found out what ‘committing adultery’
meant. In the end she destroyed him. I’m sure of it.”
Sabine sat there, with a face like stone, following with her eyes the
cloud of dust that moved along the lane as Aunt Cassie progressed on her
morning round of visits, a symbol in a way of all the forces that had
warped her own existence.
“It’s possible,” murmured Olivia.
Sabine turned toward her with a quick, sudden movement. “That’s why she
is always so concerned with the lives of other people. She has never had
any life of her own, never. She’s always been afraid. It’s why she loves
the calamities of other people, because she’s never had any of her own.
Not even her husband’s death was a calamity. It left her free,
completely free of troubles as she had always wanted to be.”
And then a strange thing happened to Olivia. It was as if a new Aunt
Cassie had been born, as if the old one, so full of tears and easy
sympathy who always appeared miraculously when there was a calamity in
the neighborhood, the Aunt Cassie who was famous for her good works and
her tears and words of religious counsel, had gone down the lane for the
last time, never to return again. To-morrow morning a new Aunt Cassie
would arrive, one who outwardly would be the same; only to Olivia she
would be different, a woman stripped of all those veils of pretense and
emotions with which she wrapped herself, an old woman naked in her
ugliness who, Olivia understood in a blinding flash of clarity, was like
an insect battering itself against a pane of glass in a futile attempt
to enter where it was impossible for her ever to enter. And she was no
longer afraid of Aunt Cassie now. She did not even dislike her; she only
pitied the old woman because she had missed so much, because she would
die without ever having lived. And she must have been young and handsome
once, and very amusing. There were still moments when the old lady’s
charm and humor and sharp tongue were completely disarming.
Sabine was talking again, in a cold, unrelenting voice. “She lay there
all those years on the sofa covered with a shawl, trying to arrange the
lives of every one about her. She killed Anson’s independence and ruined
my happiness. She terrorized her husband until in the end he died to
escape her. He was a good-natured man, horrified of scenes and
scandals.” Sabine lighted a cigarette and flung away the match with a
sudden savage gesture. “And now she goes about like an angel of pity, a
very brisk angel of pity, a harpy in angel’s clothing. She has played
her rôle well. Every one believes in her as a frail, good, unhappy
woman. Some of the saints must have been very like her. Some of them
must have been trying old maids.”
She rose and, winding the chiffon scarf about her throat, opened her
yellow parasol, saying, “I know I’m right. She’s a virgin. At least,”
she added, “in the technical sense, she’s a virgin. I know nothing about
her mind.”
And then, changing abruptly, she said, “Will you go up to Boston with me
to-morrow? I’m going to do something about my hair. There’s gray
beginning to come into it.”
Olivia did not answer her at once, but when she did speak it was to say,
“Yes; I’m going to take up riding again and I want to order clothes. My
old ones would look ridiculous now. It’s been years since I was on a
horse.”
Sabine looked at her sharply and, looking away again, said, “I’ll stop
for you about ten o’clock.”