CHAPTER VII

1

The news reached Aunt Cassie only the next morning at ten and it brought

her, full of reproaches and tears, over the dusty lanes to Pentlands.

She was hurt, she said, because they had not let her know at once. “I

should have risen from my bed and come over immediately,” she repeated.

“I was sleeping very badly, in any case. I could have managed

everything. You should have sent for Aunt Cassie at once.”

And Olivia could not tell her that they had kept her in ignorance for

that very reason--because they knew she _would_ rise from her bed and

come over at once.

Aunt Cassie it was who took the burden of the grief upon her narrow

shoulders. She wept in the manner of a professional mourner. She drew

the shades in the drawing-room, because in her mind death was not

respectable unless the rooms were darkened, and sat there in a corner

receiving callers, as if she were the one most bereft, as if indeed she

were the only one who suffered at all. She returned to her own cupolaed

dwelling only late at night and took all her meals at Pentlands, to the

annoyance of her brother, who on the second day in the midst of lunch

turned to her abruptly and said: “Cassie, if you can’t stop this eternal

blubbering, I wish you’d eat at home. It doesn’t help anything.”

At which she had risen from the table, in a sudden climax of grief and

persecution, to flee, sobbing and hurt, from the room. But she was not

insulted sufficiently to take her meals at home. She stayed on at

Pentlands because, she said, “They needed some one like me to help

out....” And to the trembling, inefficient Miss Peavey, who came and

went like a frightened rabbit on errands for her, she confided her

astonishment that her brother and Olivia should treat death with such

indifference. They did not weep; they showed no signs of grief. She was

certain that they lacked sensibility. They did not feel the tragedy.

And, weeping again, she would launch into memories of the days when the

boy had come as a little fellow to sit, pale and listless, on the floor

of her big, empty drawing-room, turning the pages of the Doré Bible.

And to Miss Peavey she also said, “It’s at times like this that one’s

breeding comes out. Olivia has failed for the first time. She doesn’t

understand the things one must do at a time like this. If she had been

brought up properly, here among us....”

For with Aunt Cassie death was a mechanical, formalized affair which one

observed by a series of traditional gestures.

It was a remarkable bit of luck, she said, that Bishop Smallwood

(Sabine’s Apostle to the Genteel) was still in the neighborhood and

could conduct the funeral services. It was proper that one of Pentland

blood should bury a Pentland (as if no one else were quite worthy of

such an honor). And she went to see the Bishop to discuss the matter of

the services. She planned that immensely intricate affair, the seating

of relations and connections--all the Canes and Struthers and Mannerings

and Sutherlands and Pentlands--at the church. She called on Sabine to

tell her that whatever her feelings about funerals might be, it was her

duty to attend this one. Sabine must remember that she was back again in

a world of civilized people who behaved as ladies and gentlemen. And to

each caller whom she received in the darkened drawing-room, she confided

the fact that Sabine must be an unfeeling, inhuman creature, because she

had not even paid a visit to Pentlands.

But she did not know what Olivia and John Pentland knew--that Sabine had

written a short, abrupt, almost incoherent note, with all the worn,

tattered, pious old phrases missing, which had meant more to them than

any of the cries and whispering and confusion that went on belowstairs,

where the whole countryside passed in and out in an endless procession.

When Miss Peavey was not at hand to run errands for her, she made Anson

her messenger.... Anson, who wandered about helpless and lost and

troubled because death had interrupted the easy, eventless flow of a

life in which usually all moved according to a set plan. Death had upset

the whole household. It was impossible to know how Anson Pentland felt

over the death of his son. He did not speak at all, and now that “The

Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” had been laid aside in

the midst of the confusion and Mr. Lowell’s desk stood buried beneath

floral offerings, there was nothing to do but wander about getting in

the way of every one and drawing upon his head the sharp reproofs of

Aunt Cassie.

It was Aunt Cassie and Anson who opened the great box of roses that came

from O’Hara. It was Aunt Cassie’s thin, blue-veined hand that tore open

the envelope addressed plainly to “Mrs. Anson Pentland.” It was Aunt

Cassie who forced Anson to read what was written inside:

“_Dear Mrs. Pentland_,

_You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more._

_Michael O’Hara._”

And it was Aunt Cassie who said, “Impertinent! Why should he send

flowers at all?” And Aunt Cassie who read the note again and again, as

if she might find in some way a veiled meaning behind the two cryptic

sentences. It was Aunt Cassie who carried the note to Olivia and

watched her while she read it and laid it quietly aside on her

dressing-table. And when she had discovered nothing she said to Olivia,

“It seems to me impertinent of him to send flowers and write such a

note. What is he to us here at Pentlands?”

Olivia looked at her a little wearily and said, “What does it matter

whether he is impertinent or not? Besides, he was a great friend of

Jack’s.” And then, straightening her tired body, she looked at Aunt

Cassie and said slowly, “He is also a friend of mine.”

It was the first time that the division of forces had stood revealed,

even for a second, the first time that Olivia had shown any feeling for

O’Hara, and there was something ominous in the quietness of a speech

made so casually. She ended any possible discussion by leaving the room

in search of Anson, leaving Aunt Cassie disturbed by the sensation of

alarm which attacked her when she found herself suddenly face to face

with the mysterious and perilous calm that sometimes took possession of

Olivia. Left alone in the room, she took up the note again from the

dressing-table and read it through for the twentieth time. There was

nothing in it ... nothing on which one could properly even pin a

suspicion.

So, in the midst of death, enveloped by the odor of tuberoses, the old

lady rose triumphant, a phoenix from ashes. In some way she found in

tragedy her proper rôle and she managed to draw most of the light from

the other actors to herself. She must have known that people went away

from the house saying, “Cassie rises to such occasions beautifully. She

has taken everything on her own shoulders.” She succeeded in conveying

the double impression that she suffered far more than any of the others

and that none of the others could possibly have done without her.

And then into the midst of her triumph came the worst that could have

happened. Olivia was the first to learn of the calamity as she always

came to know before any of the others knowledge which old John Pentland

possessed; and the others would never have known until the sad business

of the funeral was over save for Aunt Cassie’s implacable curiosity.

On the second day, Olivia, summoned by her father-in-law to come to the

library, found him there as she had found him so many times before, grim

and silent and repressed, only this time there was something

inexpressibly tragic and broken in his manner.

She did not speak to him; she simply waited until, looking up at last,

he said almost in a whisper, “Horace Pentland’s body is at the Durham

station.”

And he looked at her with the quick, pitiful helplessness of a strong

man who has suddenly grown weak and old, as if at last he had come to

the end of his strength and was turning now to her. It was then for the

first time that she began to see how she was in a way a prisoner, that

from now on, as one day passed into another, the whole life at Pentlands

would come to be more and more her affair. There was no one to take the

place of the old man ... no one, save herself.

“What shall we do?” he asked in the same low voice. “I don’t know. I am

nearly at the end of things.”

“We could bury them together,” said Olivia softly. “We could have a

double funeral.”

He looked at her in astonishment. “You wouldn’t mind that?” and when she

shook her head in answer, he replied: “But we can’t do it. There seems

to me something wrong in such an idea.... I can’t explain what I

mean.... It oughtn’t to be done.... A boy like Jack and an old reprobate

like Horace.”

They would have settled it quietly between them as they had settled so

many troubles in the last years when John Pentland had come to her for

strength, but at that moment the door opened suddenly and, without

knocking, Aunt Cassie appeared, her eyes really blazing with an angry,

hysterical light, her hair all hanging in little iron-gray wisps about

her narrow face.

“What is it?” she asked. “What has gone wrong? I know there’s something,

and you’ve no right to keep it from me.” She was shrill and brittle, as

if in those two days all the pleasure and activity surrounding death had

driven her into an orgy of excitement. At the sound of her voice, both

Olivia and John Pentland started abruptly. She had touched them on

nerves raw and worn.

The thin, high-pitched voice went on. “I’ve given up all my time to

arranging things. I’ve barely slept. I sacrifice myself to you all day

and night and I’ve a right to know.” It was as if she had sensed the

slow breaking up of the old man and sought now to hurl him aside, to

depose him as head of the family, in one great _coup d’état_, setting

herself up there in his place, a thin, fiercely intolerant tyrant; as if

at last she had given up her old subtle way of trying to gain her ends

by intrigue through the men of the family. She stood ready now to set up

a matriarchy, the last refuge of a family whose strength was gone. She

had risen thus in the same way once before within the memory of Olivia,

in those long months when Mr. Struthers, fading slowly into death,

yielded her the victory.

John Pentland sighed, profoundly, wearily, and murmured, “It’s nothing,

Cassie. It would only trouble you. Olivia and I are settling it.”

But she did not retreat. Standing there, she held her ground and

continued the tirade, working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. “I

won’t be put aside. No one ever tells me anything. For years now I’ve

been shut out as if I were half-witted. Frail as I am, I work myself to

the bone for the family and don’t even get a word of thanks.... Why is

Olivia always preferred to your own sister?” And tears of luxurious,

sensual, self-pity began to stream down her withered face. She began

even to mumble and mix her words, and she abandoned herself completely

to the fleshly pleasure of hysterics.

Olivia, watching her quietly, saw that this was no usual occasion. This

was, in truth, the new Aunt Cassie whom Sabine had revealed to her a few

days before ... the aggressively virginal Aunt Cassie who had been born

in that moment on the terrace to take the place of the old Aunt Cassie

who had existed always in an aura of tears and good works and sympathy.

She understood now what she had never understood before--that Aunt

Cassie was not merely an irrational hypochondriac, a harmless, pitiful

creature, but a ruthless and unscrupulous force. She knew that behind

this emotional debauch there lay some deeply conceived plan. Vaguely she

suspected that the plan was aimed at subduing herself, or bringing her

(Olivia) completely under the will of the old woman. It was the insect

again beating its wings frantically against the windows of a world which

she could never enter....

And softly Olivia said, “Surely, Aunt Cassie, there is no need to make a

scene ... there’s no need to be vulgar ... at a time like this.”

The old woman, suddenly speechless, looked at her brother, but from him

there came no sign of aid or succor; she must have seen, plainly, that

he had placed himself on the side of Olivia ... the outsider, who had

dared to accuse a Pentland of being vulgar.

“You heard what she said, John.... You heard what she said! She called

your sister vulgar!” But her hysterical mood began to abate suddenly, as

if she saw that she had chosen, after all, the wrong plan of attack.

Olivia did not answer her. She only sat there, looking pale and patient

and beautiful in her black clothes, waiting. It was a moment unfair to

Aunt Cassie. No man, even Anson, would have placed himself against

Olivia just then.

“If you must know, Cassie ...” the old man said slowly. “It’s a thing

you won’t want to hear. But if you must know, it is simply that Horace

Pentland’s body is at the station in Durham.”

Olivia had a quick sense of the whited sepulcher beginning to crack, to

fall slowly into bits.

At first Aunt Cassie only stared at them, snuffling and wiping her red

eyes, and then she said, in an amazingly calm voice, “You see.... You

never tell me anything. I never knew he was dead.” There was a touch of

triumph and vindication in her manner.

“There was no need of telling you, Cassie,” said the old man. “You

wouldn’t let his name be spoken in the family for years. It was you--you

and Anson--who made me threaten him into living abroad. Why should you

care when he died?”

Aunt Cassie showed signs of breaking down once more. “You see, I’m

always blamed for everything. I was thinking of the family all these

years. We couldn’t have Horace running around loose in Boston.” She

broke off with a sudden, fastidious gesture of disgust, as if she were

washing her hands of the whole affair. “I could have managed it better

myself. He ought never to have been brought home ... to stir it all up

again.”

Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt

Cassie. “He wanted to be buried here.... He wrote to ask me, when he was

dying.”

“He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his

behavior. I say it again and I’ll keep on saying it. He ought never to

have been brought back here ... after people even forgot whether he was

alive or dead.”

The perilous calm had settled over Olivia.... She had been looking out

of the window across the marshes into the distance, and when she turned

she spoke with a terrible quietness. She said: “You may do with Horace

Pentland’s body what you like. It is more your affair than mine, for I

never saw him in my life. But it is _my_ son who is dead ... _my_ son,

who belongs to _me_ more than to any of you. You may bury Horace

Pentland on the same day ... at the same service, even in the same

grave. Things like that can’t matter very much after death. You can’t go

on pretending forever.... Death is too strong for that. It’s stronger

than any of us puny creatures because it’s the one truth we can’t avoid.

It’s got nothing to do with prejudices and pride and respectability. In

a hundred years--even in a year, in a month, what will it matter what

we’ve done with Horace Pentland’s body?”

She rose, still enveloped in the perilous calm, and said: “I’ll leave

Horace Pentland to you two. There is none of his blood in my veins.

Whatever you do, I shall not object ... only I wouldn’t be too shabby in

dealing with death.”

She went out, leaving Aunt Cassie exhausted and breathless and confused.

The old woman had won her battle about the burial of Horace Pentland,

yet she had suffered a great defeat. She must have seen that she had

really lost everything, for Olivia somehow had gone to the root of

things, in the presence of John Pentland, who was himself so near to

death. (Olivia daring to say proudly, as if she actually scorned the

Pentland name, “There is none of his blood in my veins.”)

But it was a defeat which Olivia knew she would never admit: that was

one of the qualities which made it impossible to deal with Aunt Cassie.

Perhaps, even as she sat there dabbing at her eyes, she was choosing new

weapons for a struggle which had come at last into the open because it

was impossible any longer to do battle through so weak and shifting an

ally as Anson.

She was a natural martyr, Aunt Cassie. Martyrdom was the great feminine

weapon of her Victorian day and she was practised in it; she had learned

all its subtleties in the years she had lain wrapped in a shawl on a

sofa subduing the full-blooded Mr. Struthers.

And Olivia knew as she left the room that in the future she would have

to deal with a poor, abused, invalid aunt who gave all her strength in

doing good works and received in return only cruelty and heartlessness

from an outsider, from an intruder, a kind of adventuress who had wormed

her way into the heart of the Pentland family. Aunt Cassie, by a kind of

art of which she possessed the secret, would somehow make it all seem

so.

2

The heat did not go away. It hung in a quivering cloud over the whole

countryside, enveloping the black procession which moved through the

lanes into the highroad and thence through the clusters of ugly stucco

bungalows inhabited by the mill-workers, on its way past the deserted

meeting-house where Preserved Pentland had once harangued a tough and

sturdy congregation and the Rev. Josiah Milford had set out with his

flock for the Western Reserve.... It enveloped the black, slow-moving

procession to the very doors of the cool, ivy-covered stone church

(built like a stage piece to imitate some English county church) where

the Pentlands worshiped the more polite, compromising gods scorned and

berated by the witch-burner. On the way, beneath the elms of High

Street, Polish women and children stopped to stare and cross themselves

at the sight of the grand procession.

The little church seemed peaceful after the heat and the stir of the

Durham street, peaceful and hushed and crowded to the doors by the

relatives and connections of the family. Even the back pews were filled

by the poor half-forgotten remnants of the family who had no wealth to

carry them smoothly along the stream of life. Old Mrs. Featherstone (who

did washing) was there sobbing because she sobbed at all funerals, and

old Miss Haddon, the genteel Pentland cousin, dressed even in the midst

of summer in her inevitable cape of thick black broadcloth, and Mrs.

Malson, shabby-genteel in her foulards and high-pitched bonnet, and Miss

Murgatroyd whose bullfinch house was now “Ye Witch’s Broome” where one

got bad tea and melancholy sandwiches....

Together Bishop Smallwood and Aunt Cassie had planned a service

calculated skilfully to harrow the feelings and give full scope to the

vast emotional capacities of their generation and background.

They chose the most emotional of hymns, and Bishop Smallwood, renowned

for his effect upon pious and sentimental old ladies, said a few

insincere and pompous words which threw Aunt Cassie and poor old Mrs.

Featherstone into fresh excesses of grief. The services for the boy

became a barbaric rite dedicated not to his brief and pathetic existence

but to a glorification of the name he bore and of all those traits--the

narrowness, the snobbery, the lower middle-class respect for

property--which had culminated in the lingering tragedy of his sickly

life. In their respective pews Anson and Aunt Cassie swelled with pride

at the mention of the Pentland ancestry. Even the sight of the vigorous,

practical, stocky Polish women staring round-eyed at the funeral

procession a little before, returned to them now in a wave of pride and

secret elation. The same emotion in some way filtered back through the

little church from the pulpit where Bishop Smallwood (with the sob in

his voice which had won him prizes at the seminary) stood surrounded by

midsummer flowers, through all the relatives and connections, until far

in the back among the more obscure and remote ones it became simply a

pride in their relation to New England and the ancient dying village

that was fast disappearing beneath the inroads of a more vigorous

world. Something of the Pentland enchantment engulfed them all, even old

Mrs. Featherstone, with her poor back bent from washing to support the

four defective grandchildren who ought never to have been born. Through

her facile tears (she wept because it was the only pleasure left her)

there shone the light of a pride in belonging to these people who had

persecuted witches and evolved transcendentalism and Mr. Lowell and

Doctor Holmes and the good, kind Mr. Longfellow. It raised her somehow

above the level of those hardy foreigners who worshiped the Scarlet

Woman of Rome and jostled her on the sidewalks of High Street.

In all the little church there were only two or three, perhaps, who

escaped that sudden mystical surge of self-satisfaction.... O’Hara, who

was forever outside the caste, and Olivia and old John Pentland, sitting

there side by side so filled with sorrow that they did not even resent

the antics of Bishop Smallwood. Sabine (who had come, after all, to the

services) sensed the intensity of the engulfing emotion. It filled her

with a sense of slow, cold, impotent rage.

As the little procession left the church, wiping its eyes and murmuring

in lugubrious tones, the clouds which a little earlier had sprung up

against the distant horizon began to darken the whole sky. The air

became so still that the leaves on the tall, drooping elms hung as

motionless as leaves in a painted picture, and far away, gently at

first, and then with a slow, increasing menace, rose the sound of

distant echoing thunder. Ill at ease, the mourners gathered in little

groups about the steps, regarding alternately the threatening sky and

the waiting hearse, and presently, one by one, the more timorous ones

began to drift sheepishly away. Others followed them slowly until by the

time the coffin was borne out, they had all melted away save for the

members of the “immediate family” and one or two others. Sabine

remained, and O’Hara and old Mrs. Soames (leaning on John Pentland’s

arm as if it were her grandson who was dead), and old Miss Haddon in her

black cape, and the pall-bearers, and of course Bishop Smallwood and the

country rector who, in the presence of this august and saintly pillar of

the church, had faded to insignificance. Besides these there were one or

two other relatives, like Struthers Pentland, a fussy little bald man

(cousin of John Pentland and of the disgraceful Horace), who had never

married but devoted himself instead to fathering the boys of his classes

at Harvard.

It was this little group which entered the motors and hurried off after

the hearse in its shameless race with the oncoming storm.

* * * * *

The town burial-ground lay at the top of a high, bald hill where the

first settlers of Durham had chosen to dispose of their dead, and the

ancient roadway that led up to it was far too steep and stony to permit

the passing of motors, so that part way up the hill the party was forced

to descend and make the remainder of the journey on foot. As they

assembled, silently but in haste, about the open, waiting grave, the

sound of the thunder accompanied now by wild flashes of lightning, drew

nearer and nearer, and the leaves of the stunted trees and shrubs which

a moment before had been so still, began to dance and shake madly in the

green light that preceded the storm.

Bishop Smallwood, by nature a timorous man, stood beside the grave

opening his jewel-encrusted Prayer Book (he was very High Church and

fond of incense and precious stones) and fingering the pages nervously,

now looking down at them, now regarding the stolid Polish grave-diggers

who stood about waiting to bury the last of the Pentlands. There were

irritating small delays, but at last everything was ready and the

Bishop, reading as hastily as he dared, began the service in a voice

less rich and theatrical than usual.

“_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord...._”

And what followed was lost in a violent crash of thunder so that the

Bishop was able to omit a line or two without being discovered. The few

trees on the bald hill began to sway and rock, bending low toward the

earth, and the crape veils of the women performed wild black writhings.

In the uproar of wind and thunder only a sentence or two of the service

became audible....

“_For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that

the past is as a watch in the night...._”

And then again a wild, angry Nature took possession of the services,

drowning out the anxious voice of the Bishop and the loud theatrical

sobs of Aunt Cassie, and again there was a sudden breathless hush and

the sound of the Bishop’s voice, so pitiful and insignificant in the

midst of the storm, reading....

“_O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto

wisdom._”

And again:

“_For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God in His Providence to take

out of the world the soul of our deceased brother._”

And at last, with relief, the feeble, reedlike voice, repeating with

less monotony than usual: “_The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the

Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all

evermore. Amen._”

Sabine, in whose hard nature there lay some hidden thing which exulted

in storms, barely heard the service. She stood there watching the wild

beauty of the sky and the distant sea and the marshes and thinking how

different a thing the burial of the first Pentland must have been from

the timorous, hurried rite that marked the passing of the last. She

kept seeing those first fanatical, hard-faced, rugged Puritans standing

above their tombs like ghosts watching ironically the genteel figure of

the Apostle to the Genteel and his jeweled Prayer Book....

* * * * *

The Polish grave-diggers set about their work stolidly indifferent to

the storm, and before the first motor had started down the steep and

stony path, the rain came with a wild, insane violence, sweeping inward

in a wall across the sea and the black marshes. Sabine, at the door of

her motor, raised her head and breathed deeply, as if the savage,

destructive force of the storm filled her with a kind of ecstasy.

* * * * *

On the following day, cool after the storm and bright and clear, a

second procession made its way up the stony path to the top of the bald

hill, only this time Bishop Smallwood was not there, nor Cousin

Struthers Pentland, for they had both been called away suddenly and

mysteriously. And Anson Pentland was not there because he would have

nothing to do with a blackguard like Horace Pentland, even in death. In

the little group about the open grave stood Olivia and John Pentland and

Aunt Cassie, who had come because, after all, the dead man’s name was

Pentland, and Miss Haddon, (in her heavy broadcloth cape), who never

missed any funeral and had learned about this one from her friend, the

undertaker, who kept her perpetually _au courant_. There were not even

any friends to carry the coffin to the grave, and so this labor was

divided between the undertaker’s men and the grave-diggers....

And the service began again, read this time by the rector, who since

the departure of the Bishop seemed to have grown a foot in stature....

“_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord...._

“_For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is

past as a watch in the night...._

“_O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto

wisdom._”

Aunt Cassie wept again, though the performance was less good than on the

day before, but Olivia and John Pentland stood in silence while Horace

Pentland was buried at last in the midst of that little colony of grim

and respectable dead.

Sabine was there, too, standing at a little distance, as if she had a

contempt for all funerals. She had known Horace Pentland in life and she

had gone to see him in his long exile whenever her wanderings led her to

the south of France, less from affection than because it irritated the

others in the family. (He must have been happier in that warm, rich

country than he could ever have been in this cold, stony land.) But she

had come to-day less for sentimental reasons than because it gave her

the opportunity of a triumph over Aunt Cassie. She could watch Aunt

Cassie out of her cold green eyes while they all stood about to bury the

family skeleton. Sabine, who had not been to a funeral in the

twenty-five years since her father’s death, had climbed the stony hill

to the Durham town burial-ground twice in as many days....

The rector was speaking again....

“_The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the

Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen._”

The little group turned away in silence, and in silence disappeared over

the rim of the hill down the steep path. The secret burial was finished

and Horace Pentland was left alone with the Polish grave-diggers, come

home at last.

3

The peace which had taken possession of Olivia as she sat alone by the

side of her dead son, returned to her slowly with the passing of the

excitement over the funeral. Indeed, she was for once thankful for the

listless, futile enchantment which invested the quiet old world. It

soothed her at a moment when, all interest having departed from life,

she wanted merely to be left in peace. She came to see for a certainty

that there was no tragedy in her son’s death; the only tragedy had been

that he had ever lived at all such a baffled, painful, hopeless

existence. And now, after so many years of anxiety, there was peace and

a relaxation that seemed strange and in a way delicious ... moments

when, lying in the chaise longue by the window overlooking the marshes,

she was enveloped by deep and healing solitude. Even the visits of Aunt

Cassie, who would have forced her way into Olivia’s room in the

interests of “duty,” made only a vague, dreamlike impression. The old

lady became more and more a droning, busy insect, the sound of whose

buzzing grew daily more distant and vague, like the sound of a fly

against a window-pane heard through veils of sleep.

From her window she sometimes had a distant view of the old man, riding

alone now, in the trap across the fields behind the old white horse, and

sometimes she caught a glimpse of his lean figure riding the savage red

mare along the lanes. He no longer went alone with the mare; he had

yielded to Higgins’ insistent warnings of her bad temper and permitted

the groom to go with him, always at his side or a little behind to guard

him, riding a polo pony with an ease and grace which made horse and man

seem a single creature ... a kind of centaur. On a horse the ugliness

of the robust, animal little man seemed to flow away. It was as if he

had been born thus, on a horse, and was awkward and ill at ease with his

feet on the earth.

And Olivia knew the thought that was always in the mind of her

father-in-law as he rode across the stony, barren fields. He was

thinking all the while that all this land, all this fortune, even Aunt

Cassie’s carefully tended pile, would one day belong to a family of some

other name, perhaps a name which he had never even heard.

There were no more Pentlands. Sybil and her husband would be rich,

enormously so, with the Pentland money and Olivia’s money ... but there

would never be any more Pentlands. It had all come to an end in this ...

futility and oblivion. In another hundred years the name would exist, if

it existed at all, only as a memory, embalmed within the pages of

Anson’s book.

The new melancholy which settled over the house came in the end even to

touch the spirit of Sybil, so young and so eager for experience, like a

noxious mildew. Olivia noticed it first in a certain shadowy

listlessness that seemed to touch every action of the girl, and then in

an occasional faint sigh of weariness, and in the visits the girl paid

her in her room, and in the way she gave up willingly evenings at Brook

Cottage to stay at home with her mother. She saw that Sybil, who had

always been so eager, was touched by the sense of futility which she

(Olivia) had battled for so long. And Sybil, Sybil of them all, alone

possessed the chance of being saved.

She thought, “I must not come to lean on her. I must not be the sort of

mother who spoils the life of her child.”

And when John Pentland came to sit listlessly by her side, sometimes in

silence, sometimes making empty speeches that meant nothing in an effort

to cover his despair, she saw that he, too, had come to her for the

strength which she alone could give him. Even old Mrs. Soames had

failed him, for she lay ill again and able to see him only for a few

minutes each day. (It was Sabine’s opinion, uttered during one of her

morning visits, that these strange sudden illnesses came from overdoses

of drugs.)

So she came to see that she was being a coward to abandon the struggle

now, and she rose one morning almost at dawn to put on her

riding-clothes and set out with Sybil across the wet meadows to meet

O’Hara. She returned with something of her pallor gone and a manner

almost of gaiety, her spirit heightened by the air, the contact with

O’Hara and the sense of having taken up the struggle once more.

Sabine, always watchful, noticed the difference and put it down to the

presence of O’Hara alone, and in this she was not far wrong, for set

down there in Durham, he affected Olivia powerfully as one who had no

past but only a future. With him she could talk of things which lay

ahead--of his plans for the farm he had bought, of Sybil’s future, of

his own reckless, irresistible career.

* * * * *

O’Hara himself had come to a dangerous state of mind. He was one of

those men who seek fame and success less for the actual rewards than for

the satisfaction of the struggle, the fierce pleasure of winning with

all the chances against one. He had won successes already. He had his

house, his horses, his motor, his well-tailored clothes, and he knew the

value of these things, not only in the world of Durham, but in the slums

and along the wharves of Boston. He had no illusions about the imperfect

workings of democracy. He knew (perhaps because, having begun at the

very bottom, he had fought his way very near to the top) that the poor

man expects a politician to be something of a splendorous affair,

especially when he has begun his career as a very common and ordinary

sort of poor man. O’Hara was not playing his game foolishly or

recklessly. When he visited the slums or sat in at political meetings,

he was a sort of universal common man, a brother to all. When he

addressed a large meeting or presided at an assembly, he arrived in a

glittering motor and appeared in the elegant clothes suitable to a

representative of the government, of power; and so he reflected credit

on those men who had played with him as boys along India Wharf and

satisfied the universal hunger in man for something more splendorous

than the machinery of a perfect democracy.

He understood the game perfectly and made no mistakes, for he had had

the best of all training--that of knowing all sorts of people in all

sorts of conditions. In himself, he embodied them all, if the simple and

wholly kindly and honest were omitted; for he was really not a simple

man nor a wholly honest one and he was too ruthless to be kindly. He

understood people (as Sabine had guessed), with their little prides and

vanities and failings and ambitions.

Aunt Cassie and Anson in the rigidity of their minds had been unjust in

thinking that their world was the goal of his ambitions. They had, in

the way of those who depend on their environment as a justification for

their own existence, placed upon it a value out of all proportion in the

case of a man like O’Hara. To them it was everything, the ultimate to be

sought on this earth, and so they supposed it must seem to O’Hara. It

would have been impossible for them to believe that he considered it

only as a small part of his large scheme of life and laid siege to it

principally for the pleasure that he found in the battle; for it was

true that O’Hara, once he had won, would not know what to do with the

fruits of his victory.

Already he himself had begun to see this. He had begun to understand

that the victory was so easy that the battle held little savor for him.

Moments of satisfaction such as that which had overtaken him as he sat

talking to Sabine were growing more and more rare ... moments when he

would stop and think, “Here am I, Michael O’Hara, a nobody ... son of a

laborer and a housemaid, settled in the midst of such a world as Durham,

talking to such a woman as Mrs. Cane Callendar.”

No, the savor was beginning to fail, to go out of the struggle. He was

beginning to be bored, and as he grew bored he grew also restless and

unhappy.

Born in the Roman Catholic church, he was really neither a very

religious nor a very superstitious man. He was skeptic enough not to

believe all the faiths the church sought to impose upon him, yet he was

not skeptic enough to find peace of mind in an artificial will to

believe. For so long a time he had relied wholly upon himself that the

idea of leaning for support, even in lonely, restless moments, upon a

God or a church, never even occurred to him. He remained outwardly a

Roman Catholic because by denying the faith he would have incurred the

enmity of the church and many thousands of devout Irish and Italians.

The problem simply did not concern him deeply one way or the other.

And so he had come, guided for the moment by no very strong passion,

into the doldrums of confusion and boredom. Even his fellow-politicians

in Boston saw the change in him and complained that he displayed no very

great interest in the campaign to send him to Congress. He behaved at

times as if it made not the slightest difference to him whether he was

elected to Congress or not ... he, this Michael O’Hara who was so

valuable to his party, so engaging and shrewd, who could win for it

almost anything he chose.

And though he took care that no one should divine it, this strange state

of mind troubled him more deeply than any of his friends. He was

assailed by the certainty that there was something lacking from his

life, something very close to the foundations. Now that he was inactive

and bored, he had begun to think of himself for the first time. The

fine, glorious burst of first youth, when everything seemed part of a

splendid game, was over and done now, and he felt himself slipping away

toward the borderland of middle-age. Because he was a man of energy and

passion, who loved life, he felt the change with a keen sense of

sadness. There was a kind of horror for him in the idea of a lowered

tempo of life--a fear that filled him at times with a passionately

satisfactory sort of Gaelic melancholy.

In such moments, he had quite honestly taken stock of all he possessed,

and found the amassed result bitterly unsatisfactory. He had a good

enough record. He was decidedly more honorable than most men in such a

dirty business as politics--indeed, far more honorable and freer from

spites and nastinesses than many of those who had come out of this very

sacred Durham world. He had made enough money in the course of his

career, and he was winning his battle in Durham. Yet at thirty-five life

had begun to slacken, to lose some of that zest which once had led him

to rise every morning bursting with animal spirits, his brain all

a-glitter with fascinating schemes.

And then, in the very midst of this perilous state of mind, he

discovered one morning that the old sensation of delight at rising had

returned to him, only it was not because his brain was filled with

fascinating schemes. He arose with an interest in life because he knew

that in a little while he would see Olivia Pentland. He arose, eager to

fling himself on his horse and, riding across the meadows, to wait by

the abandoned gravel-pit until he saw her coming over the dew-covered

fields, radiant, it seemed to him, as the morning itself. On the days

when she did not come it was as if the bottom had dropped out of his

whole existence.

It was not that he was a man encountering the idea of woman for the

first time. There had been women in his life always, since the very

first bedraggled Italian girl he had met as a boy among the piles of

lumber along the wharves. There had been women always because it was

impossible for a man so vigorous and full of zest, so ruthless and so

scornful, to have lived thirty-five years without them, and because he

was an attractive man, filled when he chose to be, with guile and charm,

whom women found it difficult to resist. There had been plenty of women,

kept always in the background, treated as a necessity and prevented

skilfully from interfering with the more important business of making a

career.

But with Olivia Pentland, something new and disturbing had happened to

him ... something which, in his eagerness to encompass all life and

experience, possessed an overwhelming sensuous fascination. She was not

simply another woman in a procession of considerable length. Olivia

Pentland, he found, was different from any of the others ... a woman of

maturity, poised, beautiful, charming and intelligent, and besides all

these things she possessed for him a kind of fresh and iridescent bloom,

the same freshness, only a little saddened, that touched her young

daughter.

In the beginning, when they had talked together while she planned the

garden at Brook Cottage, he had found himself watching her, lost in a

kind of wonder, so that he scarcely understood what she was saying. And

all the while he kept thinking, “Here is a wonderful woman ... the most

wonderful I’ve ever seen or will ever see again ... a woman who could

make life a different affair for me, who would make of love something

which people say it is.”

She had affected him thus in a way that swept aside all the vulgar and

cynical coarseness with which a man of such experience is likely to

invest the whole idea of woman. Until now women had seemed to him made

to entertain men or to provide children for them, and now he saw that

there was, after all, something in this sentiment with which people

surrounded a love affair. For a long time he searched for a word to

describe Olivia and in the end he fell back upon the old well-worn one

which she always brought to mind. She was a “lady”--and as such she had

an overwhelming effect upon his imagination.

He had said to himself that here was a woman who could understand him,

not in the aloof, analytical fashion of a clever woman like Sabine

Callendar, but in quite another way. She was a woman to whom he could

say, “I am thus and so. My life has been of this kind. My motives are of

this sort,” and she would understand, the bad with the good. She would

be the one person in the world to whom he could pour out the whole

burden of secrets, the one woman who could ever destroy the weary sense

of loneliness which sometimes afflicted him. She made him feel that, for

all his shrewdness and hard-headed scheming, she was far wiser than he

would ever be, that in a way he was a small boy who might come to her

and, burying his head in her lap, have her stroke his thick black hair.

She would understand that there were times when a man wanted to be

treated thus. In her quiet way she was a strong woman, unselfish, too,

who did not feed upon flattery and perpetual attention, the sort of

woman who is precious to a man bent upon a career. The thought of her

filled him with a poignant feeling of sadness, but in his less romantic

moments he saw, too, that she held the power of catching him up out of

his growing boredom. She would be of great value to him.

And so Sabine had not been far wrong when she thought of him as the

small boy sitting on the curbstone who had looked up at her gravely and

said, “I’m playing.” He was at times very like such an image.

But in the end he was always brought up abruptly against the hard

reality of the fact that she was already married to a man who did not

want her himself but who would never set her free, a man who perhaps

would have sacrificed everything in the world to save a scandal in his

family. And beyond these hard, tangible difficulties he discerned, too,

the whole dark decaying web, less obvious but none the less potent, in

which she had become enmeshed.

Yet these obstacles only created a fascination to a mind so complex, so

perverse, for in the solitude of his mind and in the bitterness of the

long struggle he had known, he came to hold the whole world in contempt

and saw no reason why he should not take what he wanted from this Durham

world. Obstacles such as these provided the material for a new battle, a

new source of interest in the turbulent stream of his existence; only

this time there was a difference ... that he coveted the prize itself

more than the struggle. He wanted Olivia Pentland, strangely enough, not

for a moment or even for a month or a year, but for always.

He waited because he understood, in the shrewdness of his long

experience, that to be insistent would only startle such a woman and

cause him to lose her entirely, and because he knew of no plan of action

which could overcome the obstacles which kept them apart. He waited, as

he had done many times in his career, for circumstances to solve

themselves. And while he waited, with each time that he saw her she grew

more and more desirable, and his own invincible sense of caution became

weaker and weaker.

4

In those long days spent in her room, Olivia had come slowly to be aware

of the presence of the newcomer at Brook Cottage. It had begun on the

night of Jack’s death with the sound of his music drifting across the

marshes, and after the funeral Sabine had talked of him to Olivia with

an enthusiasm curiously foreign to her. Once or twice she had caught a

glimpse of him crossing the meadows toward O’Hara’s shining chimneys or

going down the road that led through the marshes to the sea--a tall,

red-haired young man who walked with a slight limp. Sybil, she found,

was strangely silent about him, but when she questioned the girl about

her plans for the day she found, more often than not, that they had to

do with him. When she spoke of him, Sybil had a way of blushing and

saying, “He’s very nice, Mother. I’ll bring him over when you want to

see people.... I used to know him in Paris.”

And Olivia, wisely, did not press her questions. Besides, Sabine had

told her almost all there was to know ... perhaps more than Sybil

herself knew.

Sabine said, “He belongs to a rather remarkable family ... wilful,

reckless and full of spirit. His mother is probably the most remarkable

of them all. She’s a charming woman who has lived luxuriously in Paris

most of her life ... not one of the American colony. She doesn’t ape any

one and she’s incapable of pretense of any sort. She’s lived, rather

alone, over there on money ... quite a lot of money ... which seems to

come out of steel-mills in some dirty town of the Middle West. She’s one

of my great friends ... a woman of no intellect, but very beautiful and

blessed with a devastating charm. She is one of the women who was born

for men.... She’s irresistible to them, and I imagine there have been

men in her life always. She was made for men, but her taste is perfect,

so her morals don’t matter.”

The woman ... indeed all Jean de Cyon’s family ... seemed to fascinate

Sabine as she sat having tea with Olivia, for she went on and on,

talking far more than usual, describing the house of Jean’s mother, her

friends, the people whom one met at her dinners, all there was to tell

about her.

“She’s the sort of woman who has existed since the beginning of time.

There’s some mystery about her early life. It has something to do with

Jean’s father. I don’t think she was happy with him. He’s never

mentioned. Of course, she’s married again now to a Frenchman ... much

older than herself ... a man, very distinguished, who has been in three

cabinets. That’s where the boy gets his French name. The old man has

adopted him and treats him like his own son. De Cyon is a good name in

France, one of the best; but of course Jean hasn’t any French blood.

He’s pure American, but he’s never seen his own country until now.”

Sabine finished her tea and putting her cup back on the Regence table

(which had come from Olivia’s mother and so found its graceful way into

a house filled with stiff early American things), she added, “It’s a

remarkable family ... wild and restless. Jean had an aunt who died in

the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, and his cousin is Lilli Barr ... a

really great musician.” She looked out of the window and after a moment

said in a low voice, “Lilli Barr is the woman whom my husband married

... but she divorced him, too, and now we are friends ... she and I.”

The familiar hard, metallic laugh returned and she added, “I imagine our

experience with him made us sympathetic.... You see, I know the family

very well. It’s the sort of blood which produces people with a genius

for life ... for living in the moment.”

She did not say that Jean and his mother and the ruthless cousin Lilli

Barr fascinated her because they stood in a way for the freedom toward

which she had been struggling through all the years since she escaped

from Durham. They were free in a way from countries, from towns, from

laws, from prejudices, even in a way from nationality. She had hoped

once that Jean might interest himself in her own sullen, independent,

clever Thérèse, but in her knowledge of the world she had long ago

abandoned that hope, knowing that a boy so violent and romantic, so

influenced by an upbringing among Frenchmen, a youth so completely

masculine, was certain to seek a girl more soft and gentle and feminine

than Thérèse. She knew it was inevitable that he should fall in love

with a girl like Sybil, and in a way she was content because it fell in

admirably with her own indolent plans. The Pentlands were certain to

look upon Jean de Cyon as a sort of gipsy, and when they knew the whole

truth....

The speculation fascinated her. The summer in Durham, even with the

shadow of Jack’s death flung across it, was not proving as dreadful as

she had feared; and this new development interested her as something she

had never before observed ... an idyllic love affair between two young

people who each seemed to her a perfect, charming creature.

5

It had all begun on the day nearly a year earlier when all Paris was

celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil

had gone with Thérèse and Sabine to lay a wreath beside the flame at the

Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about

which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment). And afterward she

played in the garden with the dogs which they would not let her keep at

the school in Saint-Cloud, and then she had gone into the house to find

there a fascinating and beautiful woman of perhaps fifty--a Madame de

Cyon, who had come to lunch, with her son, a young man of twenty-four,

tall, straight and slender, with red hair and dark blue eyes and a deep,

pleasant voice. On account of the day he was dressed in his cuirassier’s

uniform of black and silver, and because of an old wound he walked with

a slight limp. Almost at once (she remembered this when she thought of

him) he had looked at her in a frank, admiring way which gave her a

sense of pleasurable excitement wholly new in her experience.

Something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the

air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the _Marseillaise_

and the _Sambre et Meuse_, the sight of the soldiers in the street and

the great Arc with the flame burning there ... something in the feel of

Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of

her. It was something which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon

the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.

She knew vaguely that she must have fallen in love in the moment she

stood there in Sabine Callendar’s salon bowing to Lily de Cyon. The

experience had grown in intensity when, after lunch, she took him into

the garden to show him her dogs and watched him rubbing the ears of the

Doberman “Imp” and talking to the dog softly in a way which made her

know that he felt about animals as she did. He had been so pleasant in

his manner, so gentle in his bigness, so easy to talk to, as if they had

always been friends.

And then almost at once he had gone away to the Argentine, without even

seeing her again, on a trip to learn the business of cattle-raising

because he had the idea that one day he might settle himself as a

rancher. But he left behind him a vivid image which with the passing of

time grew more and more intense in the depths of a romantic nature which

revolted at the idea of Thérèse choosing a father scientifically for her

child. It was an image by which she had come, almost unconsciously, to

measure other men, even to such small details as the set of their

shoulders and the way they used their hands and the timbre of their

voices. It was this she had really meant when she said to her mother,

“I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly.” She had

meant, quite without knowing it, that it must be a man like Jean de Cyon

... charming, romantic and a little wild.

She had not forgotten him, though there were moments at the school in

Saint-Cloud when she had believed she would never see him again--moments

when she was swept by a delicious sense of hopeless melancholy in which

she believed that her whole life had been blighted, and which led her to

make long and romantic entries in the diary that was kept hidden beneath

her mattress. And so as she grew more hopeless, the aura of romance

surrounding him took on colors deeper and more varied and intense. She

had grown so pale that Mademoiselle Vernueil took to dosing her, and

Thérèse accused her abruptly of having fallen in love, a thing she

denied vaguely and with overtones of romantic mystery.

And then with the return to Pentlands (a return advised by her mother on

account of Jack’s health) the image dimmed a little in the belief that

even by the wildest flights of imagination there was no chance of her

seeing him again. It became a hopeless passion; she prepared herself to

forget him and, in the wisdom of her young mind, grow accustomed to the

idea of marrying one of the tame young men who were so much more

suitable and whom her family had always known. She had watched her

admirers carefully, weighing them always against the image of the young

man with red hair, dressed in the black and silver of the cuirassiers,

and beside that image they had seemed to her--even the blond,

good-looking Mannering boy--like little boys, rather naughty and not

half so old and wise as herself. She had reconciled herself secretly and

with gravity to the idea of making one of the matches common in her

world--a marriage determined by property and the fact that her fiancé

would be “the right sort of person.”

And so the whole affair had come to take on the color of a tragic

romance, to be guarded secretly. Perhaps when she was an old woman she

would tell the story to her grandchildren. She believed that whomever

she married, she would be thinking always of Jean de Cyon. It was one of

those half-comic illusions of youth in which there is more than a grain

of melancholy truth.

And then abruptly had come the news of his visit to Brook Cottage. She

still kept her secret, but not well enough to prevent her mother and

Sabine from suspecting it. She had betrayed herself first on the very

night of Jack’s death when she had said, with a sudden light in her eye,

“It’s Jean de Cyon.... I’d forgotten he was arriving to-night.” Olivia

had noticed the light because it was something which went on and on.

* * * * *

And at Brook Cottage young de Cyon, upset by the delay caused by the

funeral and the necessity of respecting the mourning at Pentlands, had

sulked and behaved in such a way that he would have been a nuisance to

any one save Sabine, who found amusement in the spectacle. Used to

rushing headlong toward anything he desired (as he had rushed into the

French army at seventeen and off to the Argentine nine months ago), he

turned ill-tempered and spent his days out of doors, rowing on the river

and bathing in the solitude of the great white beach. He quarreled with

Thérèse, whom he had known since she was a little girl, and tried to be

as civil as possible toward the amused Sabine.

She knew by now that he had not come to Durham through any great

interest in herself or Thérèse. She knew now how wise she had been (for

the purposes of her plan) to have included in her invitation to him the

line ... “Sybil Pentland lives on the next farm to us. You may remember

her. She lunched with us last Armistice Day.”

She saw that he rather fancied himself as a man of the world who was

being very clever in keeping his secret. He asked her about Sybil

Pentland in a casual way that was transparently artificial, and

consulted her on the lapse of time decently necessary before he broke in

upon the mourning at Pentlands, and had Miss Pentland shown any

admiration for the young men about Durham? If he had not been so

charming and impatient he would have bored Sabine to death.

The young man was afraid of only one thing ... that perhaps she had

changed in some way, that perhaps she was not in the reality as charming

as she had seemed to him in the long months of his absence. He was not

without experience (indeed, Sabine believed that he had gone to the

Argentine to escape from some Parisian complication) and he knew that

such calamitous disappointments _could_ happen. Perhaps when he came to

know her better the glamour would fade. Perhaps she did not remember him

at all. But she seemed to him, after months of romantic brooding, the

most desirable woman he had ever seen.

* * * * *

It was a new world in which he discovered himself, in some way a newer

and more different world than the vast grass-covered plains from which

he had just come. People about Durham, he learned, had a way of saying

that Boston and Durham were like England, but this he put down quietly

as a kind of snobbery, because Boston and Durham weren’t like England at

all, so far as he could see; in spots Boston and Durham seemed old, but

there wasn’t the same richness, the same glamour about them. They should

have been romantic and yet they were not; they were more, it seemed to

him, like the illustrations in a school history. They were dry ...

_sec_, he thought, considering the French word better in this case on

account of its sound.

And it wasn’t the likeness to England that he found interesting, but

rather the difference ... the bleak rawness of the countryside and the

sight of whole colonies of peoples as strange and foreign as the Czechs

and Poles providing a sort of alien background to the whole picture.

He had gone about the business of becoming acquainted with his own

country in a thorough, energetic fashion, and being a sensuous youth,

filled with a taste for colors and sounds and all the emanations of the

spectacle of life, he was acutely conscious of it.

To Sabine, he said, “You know the funny thing is that it seems to me

like coming home. It makes me feel that I belong in America ... not in

Durham, but in New York or some of those big roaring towns I’ve passed

through.”

He spoke, naturally enough, not at all like an American but in the

clipped English fashion, rather swallowing his words, and now and then

with a faint trace of French intonation. His voice was deeper and richer

than the New England voices, with their way of calling Charles Street

“Challs Street” and sacred Harvard ... “Havaad.”

It was the spectacle of New York which had fascinated him more than any

other because it surpassed all his dreams of it and all the descriptions

people had given him of its immense force and barbaric splendor and the

incredible variety of tongues and people. New York, Sabine told him with

a consciousness of uttering treason, _was_ America, far more than the

sort of life he would encounter in Durham.

As he talked to Sabine of New York, he would rise to that pitch of

excitement and enthusiasm which comes to people keenly alive. He even

confided in her that he had left Europe never to return there to live.

“It’s old country,” he said, “and if one has been brought up there, as

I’ve been, there’s no reason for going back there to live. In a way it’s

a dead world ... dead surely in comparison to the Americas. And it’s the

future that interests me ... not the past. I want to be where the most

is going on ... in the center of things.”

When he was not playing the piano wildly, or talking to Sabine, or

fussing about with Thérèse among the frogs and insects of the laboratory

she had rigged up on the glass-enclosed piazza, he was walking about the

garden in a state of suppressed excitement, turning over and over in his

young mind his own problem and the plans he had for adjusting himself in

this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of twenty-five,

was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young

Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin

Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled

with a reckless sense of adventure ... young men irresistible in such an

old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.

To ease his impatience he sought refuge in a furious physical activity,

rowing, swimming and driving with Sabine about the Durham countryside.

He could not walk far, on account of the trouble caused by his old

wound, but he got as far as O’Hara’s house, where he met the Irishman

and they became friends. O’Hara turned over to him a canoe and a

rowing-scull and told him that whenever his leg was better he might have

a horse from his stables.

One morning as he pulled his canoe up the muddy bank of the river after

his early exercise, he heard the sound of hoofs in the thick mud near at

hand and, turning, he saw Sybil Pentland on her mare Andromache coming

out of the thicket almost at his side.

It was a superb morning--cool for Durham in mid-August--and on the lazy

river the nympheas spread their waxy white blossoms in starlike clusters

against a carpet of green pads. It was a morning made for delights, with

the long rays of the rising sun striking to silver the dew-hung

spider-webs that bound together the tangled masses of wild-grape vines;

and young de Cyon, standing on the edge of the path, flushed with health

and the early morning exercise, his thick red hair all rumpled, was

overcome swiftly by a sense of tremendous physical well-being and

strength. A whole world lay before him waiting to be conquered; and into

it, out of the tangled thicket, had come Sybil Pentland, more charming

in the flesh than she had seemed to him even on the long starlit nights

when he lay awake on the pampas thinking of her.

For a second neither of them said anything. The girl, startled and

blushing a little, but touched, too, by a quiet sense of dignity, drew

in her mare; and Jean, looking up at her, said in a falsely casual way

(for his veins were throbbing with excitement), “Oh! Hello! You’re Miss

Pentland.”

“Yes.” But she looked suddenly disappointed, as if she _really_ believed

that he had almost forgotten her.

Standing clad only in trousers and a rowing-shirt, he looked down at his

costume and said, grinning, “I’m not dressed to receive visitors.”

Somehow this served to break the sense of restraint, and they fell into

conversation, exchanging a few banal remarks on the beauty of the

morning, and Jean, standing by Andromache, rubbing her nose with the

same tenderness he had shown toward Sybil’s dogs, looked at her out of

the candid blue eyes and said, “I should have come to see you sooner,

only I thought you mightn’t want to see me.”

A quivering note of warmth colored his voice.

“It would have made no difference,” she said. “And now you must come

often ... as often as you like. How long are you staying at Brook

Cottage?”

For a second he hesitated. “A fortnight ... perhaps. Perhaps ...

longer.”

And looking down at him, she thought, “I must make him stay. If I lose

him again now.... I must make him stay. I like him more than any one in

the world. I can’t lose him now.”

And she began to reason with herself that Fate was on her side, that

destiny had delivered him again into her hands. It was like a thing

ordained, and life with him would be exciting, a thrilling affair. The

quiet stubbornness, come down to her from Olivia, began to rise and take

possession of her. She was determined not to lose him.

They moved away up the river, still talking in a rather stiff fashion,

while Jean walked beside Andromache, limping a little. One banality

followed another as they groped toward each other, each proud and

fearful of showing his feelings, each timid and yet eager and impatient.

It was the excitement of being near to each other that made the

conversation itself take on a sense of importance. Neither of them

really knew what they were saying. In one sense they seemed strange and

exciting to each other, but in another they were not strange at all

because there lay between them that old feeling, which Sybil had

recognized in the garden of the Rue de Tilsitt, that they had known each

other always. There were no hesitations or doubts or suspicions.

The sky was brilliant; the scent of the mucky river and growing weeds

was overwhelming. There came to both of them a quickening of the senses,

a sort of heightened ecstasy, which shut out all the world. It was a

kind of enchantment, but different from the enchantment which enveloped

the dead house at Pentlands.

6

Each time that Olivia rose at dawn to ride out with Sybil and meet

O’Hara at the old gravel-pit, the simple excursion became more glamorous

to her. There was a youth in the contact with Sybil and the Irishman

which she had almost forgotten, a feeling of strength for which she had

long been hungering. It was, she found, a splendid way to begin the

day--in the cool of the morning, riding away over the drenched grass; it

made a freshening contrast to the rest of a day occupied largely by such

old people as her father-in-law and Anson (who was really an old man)

and the old woman in the north wing and by the persistent fluttering

attacks of Aunt Cassie. And Olivia, who was not without a secret vanity,

began to notice herself in the mirror ... that her eyes were brighter

and her skin was more clear. She saw that she was even perhaps

beautiful, and that the riding-habit became her in a romantic fashion.

She knew, too, riding across the fields between Sybil and O’Hara, that

he sometimes watched her with a curious bright light in his blue eyes.

He said nothing; he betrayed in no way the feeling behind all that

sudden, quiet declaration on the terrace of Brook Cottage. She began to

see that he was (as Sabine had discovered almost at once) a very clever

and dangerous man. It was not alone because of the strange, almost

physical, effect he had upon people--an effect which was almost as if

his presence took possession of you completely--but because he had

patience and knew how to be silent. If he had rushed in, recklessly and

clumsily, everything would have been precipitated and ruined at once.

There would have been a scene ending with his dismissal and Olivia,

perhaps, would have been free; but he had never touched her. It was

simply that he was always there, assuring her in some mysterious way

that his emotions had not changed, that he still wanted her more than

anything in all the world. And to a woman who was romantic by nature and

had never known any romance, it was a dangerous method.

There came a morning when, waiting by the gravel-pit, O’Hara saw that

there was only one rider coming toward him across the fields from

Pentlands. At first it occurred to him that it must be Sybil coming

alone, without her mother, and the old boredom and despair engulfed him

swiftly. It was only when the rider came nearer and he saw the white

star in the forehead of her horse that he knew it was Olivia herself.

That she came alone, knowing what he had already told her, he took as a

sign of immense importance.

This time he did not wait or ride slowly toward her. He galloped

impatiently as a boy across the wet fields to meet her.

She had the old look of radiance about her and a shyness, too, that made

her seem at first a trifle cool and withdrawn. She told him quietly,

“Sybil didn’t come this morning. She went out very early to fish with

Jean de Cyon. The mackerel are beginning to run in the open water off

the marshes.”

There was an odd, strained silence and O’Hara said, “He’s a nice boy ...

de Cyon.” And then, with a heroic effort to overcome the shyness which

she always managed to impose upon him, he said in a low voice, “But I’m

glad she didn’t come. I’ve wanted it to be like this all along.”

She did not say archly that he must not talk in this vein. It was a part

of her fascination that she was too honest and intelligent not to

dispense with such coquetry. He had had enough of coquetry from cheap

women and had wearied of it long ago. Besides, she had wanted it “like

this” herself and she knew that with O’Hara it was silly to pretend,

because sooner or later he always found her out. They were not

children, either of them. They both knew what they were doing, that it

was a dangerous, even a reckless thing; and yet the very sense of

excitement made the adventure as irresistible to the one as to the

other.

For a little time they rode in silence, watching the dark hoofs of the

horses as they sent up little showers of glittering dew from the

knee-deep grass and clover, and presently as they turned out of the

fields into the path that led into the birch woods, he laughed and said,

“A penny for your thoughts.”

Smiling, she replied, “I wouldn’t sell them for millions.”

“They must be very precious.”

“Perhaps ... precious to me, and to no one else.”

“Not to any one at all....”

“No.... I don’t think they’d interest any one. They’re not too

cheerful.”

At this he fell silent again, with an air of brooding and

disappointment. For a time she watched him, and presently she said, “You

mustn’t sulk on a morning like this.”

“I’m not sulking.... I was only ... thinking.”

She laughed. “A penny for your thoughts.”

He did not laugh. He spoke with a sudden intensity. “They, too, are

worth a million ... more than that ... only I’ll share them with you. I

wouldn’t share them with any one else.”

At the sound of his voice, a silly wave of happiness swept through

Olivia. She thought, “I’m being young and ridiculous and enjoying

myself.”

Aloud she said, “I haven’t a penny, but if you’ll trust me until

to-morrow?”

And then he turned to her abruptly, the shyness gone and in its place an

emotion close to irritation and anger. “Why buy them?” he asked. “You

know well enough what they are. You haven’t forgotten what I told you

on the terrace at Brook Cottage.... It’s grown more true every day ...

all of it.” When he saw that she had become suddenly grave, he said,

“And what about you?”

“You know how impossible it is.”

“Nothing is impossible ... nothing. Besides, I don’t mean the

difficulties. Those will come later.... I only mean your own feelings.”

“Can’t you see that I like you?... I must like you else I wouldn’t have

come alone this morning.”

“Like me,” he echoed with bitterness. “I’m not interested in having you

like me!” And when she made no reply, he added, almost savagely, “Why do

you keep me away from you? Why do you always put a little wall about

yourself?”

“Do I?” she asked, stupidly, and with a sense of pain.

“You are cool and remote even when you laugh.”

“I don’t want to be--I hate cold people.”

For a moment she caught a quick flash of the sudden bad temper which

sometimes betrayed him. “It’s because you’re so damned ladylike.

Sometimes I wish you were a servant or a scrub-woman.”

“And then I wouldn’t be the same--would I?”

He looked up quickly, as if to make a sudden retort, and then, checking

himself, rode on in silence. Stealing a glance at him, Olivia caught

against the wall of green a swift image of the dark, stubborn tanned

head--almost, she thought, like the head of a handsome bull--bent a

little, thoughtfully, almost sadly; and again a faint, weak feeling

attacked her--the same sensation that had overcome her on the night of

her son’s death when she sat regarding the back of Anson’s head and not

seeing it at all. She thought, “Why is it that this man--a

stranger--seems nearer to me than Anson has ever been? Why is it that I

talk to him in a way I never talked to Anson?” And a curious feeling of

pity seized her at the sight of the dark head. In a quick flash of

understanding she saw him as a little boy searching awkwardly for

something which he did not understand; she wanted to stroke the thick,

dark hair in a comforting fashion.

He was talking again. “You know nothing about me,” he was saying. “And

sometimes I think you ought to know it all.” Looking at her quickly he

asked, “Could you bear to hear it ... a little of it?”

She smiled at him, certain that in some mysterious, clairvoyant fashion

she had penetrated the very heart of his mood, and she thought, “How

sentimental I’m being ... how sickeningly sentimental!” Yet it was a

rich, luxuriant mood in which her whole being relaxed and bathed itself.

She thought again, “Why should I not enjoy this? I’ve been cautious all

my life.”

And seeing her smile, he began to talk, telling her, as they rode toward

the rising sun, the story of his humble origin and of those early bitter

days along India Wharf, and from time to time she said, “I understand.

My own childhood wasn’t happy,” or, “Go on, please. It fascinates me ...

more than you can imagine.”

So he went on, telling her the story of the long scar on his temple,

telling her as he had known he would, of his climb to success,

confessing everything, even the things of which he had come to be a

little ashamed, and betraying from time to time the bitterness which

afflicts those who have made their own way against great odds. The

shrewd, complex man became as naïve as a little boy; and she understood,

as he had known she would. It was miraculous how right he had been about

her.

Lost in this mood, they rode on and on as the day rose and grew warm,

enveloped all the while in the odor of the dark, rich, growing thicket

and the acrid smell of the tall marshferns, until Olivia, glancing at

her watch, said, “It is very late. I shall have missed the family

breakfast.” She meant really that Anson would have gone up to Boston by

now and that she was glad--only it was impossible to say a thing like

that.

* * * * *

At the gravel-pit, she bade him good-by, and turning her mare toward

Pentlands she felt the curious effect of his nearness slipping away from

her with each new step; it was as if the hot August morning were turning

cold. And when she came in sight of the big red brick house sitting so

solidly among the ancient elms, she thought, “I must never do this

again. I have been foolish.” And again, “Why should I not do it? Why

should I not be happy? They have no right to any claim upon me.”

But there was one claim, she knew; there was Sybil. She must not make a

fool of herself for the sake of Sybil. She must do nothing to interfere

with what had been taking place this very morning in the small

fishing-boat far out beyond the marshes somewhere near the spot where

Savina Pentland had been drowned. She knew well enough why Sybil had

chosen to go fishing instead of riding; it was so easy to look at the

girl and at young de Cyon and know what was happening there. She herself

had no right to stand in the way of this other thing which was so much

younger and fresher, so much more nearly perfect.

As she put her mare over the low wall by the stables she looked up and

chanced to see a familiar figure in rusty black standing in the garden,

as if she had been there all the while looking out over the meadows,

watching them. As she drew near, Aunt Cassie came forward with an

expression of anxiety on her face, saying in a thin, hushed voice, as if

she might be overheard, “I thought you’d never come back, Olivia dear.

I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Aware from the intense air of mystery that some new calamity had

occurred, Olivia replied, “I was riding with O’Hara. We went too far and

it was too hot to hurry the horses.”

“I know,” said Aunt Cassie. “I saw you.” (“Of course she would,” thought

Olivia. “Does anything ever escape her?”) “It’s about _her_. She’s been

violent again this morning and Miss Egan says you may be able to do

something. She keeps raving about something to do with the attic and

Sabine.”

“Yes, I know what it is. I’ll go right up.”

Higgins appeared, grinning and with a bright birdlike look in his sharp

eyes, as if he knew all that had been happening and wanted to say, “Ah,

you were out with O’Hara this morning ... alone.... Well, you can’t do

better, Ma’am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man

like that.”

As he took the bridle, he said, “That’s a fine animal Mr. O’Hara rides,

Ma’am. I wish we had him in our stables....”

She murmured something in reply and without even waiting for coffee

hastened up the dark stairs to the north wing. On the way past the row

of tall deep-set windows she caught a swift glimpse of Sabine, superbly

dressed and holding a bright yellow parasol over her head, moving

indolently up the long drive toward the house, and again she had a

sudden unaccountable sense of something melancholy, perhaps even tragic,

a little way off. It was one of those quick, inexplicable waves of

depression that sweeps over one like a shadow. She said to herself, “I’m

depressed now because an hour ago I was too happy.”

And immediately she thought, “But it was like Aunt Cassie to have such a

thought as that. I must take care or I’ll be getting to be a true

Pentland ... believing that if I’m happy a calamity is soon to follow.”

She had moments of late when it seemed to her that something in the air,

some power hidden in the old house itself, was changing her slowly,

imperceptibly, in spite of herself.

* * * * *

Miss Egan met her outside the door, with the fixed eternal smile which

to-day seemed to Olivia the sort of smile that the countenance of Fate

itself might wear.

“The old lady is more quiet,” she said. “Higgins helped me and we

managed to bind her in the bed so that she couldn’t harm herself. It’s

surprising how much strength she has in her poor thin body.” She

explained that old Mrs. Pentland kept screaming, “Sabine! Sabine!” for

Mrs. Callendar and that she kept insisting on being allowed to go into

the attic.

“It’s the old idea that she’s lost something up there,” said Miss Egan.

“But it’s probably only something she’s imagined.” Olivia was silent for

a moment. “I’ll go and search,” she said. “It might be there is

something and if I could find it, it would put an end to these spells.”

* * * * *

She found them easily, almost at once, now that there was daylight

streaming in at the windows of the cavernous attic. They lay stuffed

away beneath one of the great beams ... a small bundle of ancient

yellowed letters which had been once tied together with a bit of mauve

ribbon since torn in haste by some one who thrust them in this place of

concealment. They had been opened carelessly and in haste, for the

moldering paper was all cracked and torn along the edges. The ink,

violet once, had turned to a dirty shade of brown.

Standing among the scattered toys left by Jack and Sybil the last time

they had played house, Olivia held the letters one by one up to the

light. There were eleven in all and each one was addressed to Mrs. J.

Pentland, at Pentlands. Eight of them had been sent through the Boston

post-office and the other three bore no stamps of any kind, as if they

had been sent by messengers or in a bouquet or between the leaves of a

book. The handwriting was that of a man, large, impetuous, sprawling,

which showed a tendency to blur the letters together in a headlong,

impatient way.

She thought at once, “They are addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, which

means Mrs. Jared Pentland. Anson will be delighted, for these must be

the letters which passed between Savina Pentland and her cousin, Toby

Cane. Anson needed them to complete the book.”

And then it occurred to her that there was something strange about the

letters--in their having been hidden and perhaps found by the old lady

belowstairs and then hidden away a second time. Old Mrs. Pentland must

have found them there nearly forty years ago, when they still allowed

her to wander about the house. Perhaps it had been on one of those rainy

days when Anson and Sabine had come into the attic to play in this very

corner with these same old toys--the days when Sabine refused to pretend

that muddy water was claret. And now the old lady was remembering the

discovery after all these years because the return of Sabine and the

sound of her name had lighted some train of long-forgotten memories.

Seating herself on a broken, battered old trunk, she opened the first of

the letters reverently so as not to dislodge the bits of violet

sealing-wax that still clung to the edges, and almost at once she read

with a swift sense of shock:

_Carissima_,

_I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you

didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was

still there at Pentlands with you...._

She stopped reading. She understood it now.... The scamp Toby Cane had

been more than merely a cousin to Savina Pentland; he had been her lover

and that was why she had hidden the letters away beneath the beams of

the vast unfinished attic, intending perhaps to destroy them one day.

And then she had been drowned before there was time and the letters lay

in their hiding-place until John Pentland’s wife had discovered them one

day by chance, only to hide them again, forgetting in the poor shocked

mazes of her mind what they were or where they were hidden. They were

the letters which Anson had been searching for.

But she saw at once that Anson would never use the letters in his book,

for he would never bring into the open a scandal in the Pentland family,

even though it was a scandal which had come to an end, tragically,

nearly a century earlier and was now almost pure romance. She saw, of

course, that a love affair between so radiant a creature as Savina

Pentland and a scamp like Toby Cane would seem rather odd in a book

called “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” Perhaps

it was better not to speak of the letters at all. Anson would manage

somehow to destroy all the value there was in them; he would sacrifice

truth to the gods of Respectability and Pretense.

Thrusting the letters into her pocket, she descended the dark stairway,

and in the north wing Miss Egan met her to ask, almost with an air of

impatience, “I suppose you didn’t find anything?”

“No,” said Olivia quickly, “nothing which could possibly have interested

her.”

“It’s some queer idea she’s hatched up,” replied Miss Egan, and looked

at Olivia as if she doubted the truth of what she had said.

* * * * *

She did not go downstairs at once. Instead, she went to her own room and

after bathing, seated herself in the chaise longue by the open window

above the terrace, prepared to read the letters one by one. From below

there arose a murmur of voices, one metallic and hard, the other

nervous, thin, and high-pitched--Sabine’s and Aunt Cassie’s--as they sat

on the terrace in acid conversation, each trying to outstay the other.

Listening, Olivia decided that she was a little weary of them both this

morning; it was the first time it had ever occurred to her that in a

strange way there was a likeness between two women who seemed so

different. That curious pair, who hated each other so heartily, had the

same way of trying to pry into her life.

None of the letters bore any dates, so she fell to reading them in the

order in which they had been found, beginning with the one which read:

_Carissima_,

_I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you

didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was

still there at Pentlands with you...._

She read on:

_It’s the thought of his being there beside you, even taking

possession of you sometimes, that I can’t bear. I see him sitting

there in the drawing-room, looking at you--eating you with his eyes

and pretending all the while that he is above the lusts of the

flesh. The flesh! The flesh! You and I, dearest, know the glories

of the flesh. Sometimes I think I’m a coward not to kill him at

once._

_For God’s sake, get rid of him somehow to-night. I can’t pass

another evening alone in the dark gloomy cottage waiting in vain.

It is more than I can bear to sit there knowing that every minute,

every second, may bring the sound of your step. Be merciful to me.

Get rid of him somehow._

_I have not touched a drop of anything since I last saw you. Are

you satisfied with that?_

_I am sending this in a book by black Hannah. She will wait for an

answer._

Slowly, as she read on and on through the mazes of the impetuous,

passionate writing, the voices from the terrace below, the one raised

now and a little angry, the other still metallic, hard and indifferent,

grew more and more distant until presently she did not hear them at all

and in the place of the sound her senses received another

impression--that of a curious physical glow, stealing slowly through her

whole body. It was as if there lay in that faded brown writing a

smoldering fire that had never wholly died out and would never be

extinguished until the letters themselves had been burned into ashes.

Word by word, line by line, page by page, the whole tragic, passionate

legend came to recreate itself, until near the end she was able to see

the three principal actors in it with the reality of life, as if they

had never died at all but had gone on living in this old house, perhaps

in this very room where she sat ... the very room which once must have

belonged to Savina Pentland.

She saw the husband, that Jared Pentland of whom no portrait existed

because he would never spend money on such a luxury, as he must have

been in life--a sly man, shrewd and pious and avaricious save when the

strange dark passion for his wife made of him an unbalanced creature.

And Savina Pentland herself was there, as she looked out of the Ingres

portrait--dark, voluptuous, reckless, with her bad enticing eyes--a

woman who might easily be the ruin of a man like Jared Pentland. And

somehow she was able to get a clear and vivid picture of the writer of

those smoldering letters--a handsome scamp of a lover, dark like his

cousin Savina, and given to drinking and gambling. But most of all she

was aware of that direct, unashamed and burning passion that never had

its roots in this stony New England soil beyond the windows of

Pentlands. A man who frankly glorified the flesh! A waster! A seducer!

And yet a man capable of this magnificent fire which leaped up from the

yellow pages and warmed her through and through. It occurred to her then

for the first time that there was something heroic and noble and

beautiful in a passion so intense. For a moment she was even seized by

the feeling that reading these letters was a kind of desecration.

They revealed, too, how Jared Pentland had looked upon his beautiful

wife as a fine piece of property, an investment which gave him a sensual

satisfaction and also glorified his house and dinner-table. (What Sabine

called the “lower middle-class sense of property.”) He must have loved

her and hated her at once, in the way Higgins loved and hated the

handsome red mare. He must have been proud of her and yet hated her

because she possessed so completely the power of making a fool of him.

The whole story moved against a background of family ... the Pentland

family. There were constant references to cousins and uncles and aunts

and their suspicions and interference.

“It must have begun,” thought Olivia, “even in those days.”

Out of the letters she learned that the passion had begun in Rome when

Savina Pentland was sitting for her portrait by Ingres. Toby Cane had

been there with her and afterwards she had gone with him to his

lodgings; and when they had returned to the house at Durham (almost new

then and the biggest country seat in all New England) they had met in

the cottage--Brook Cottage, which still stood there within sight of

Olivia’s window--Brook Cottage, which after the drowning had been bought

by Sabine’s grandfather and then fallen into ruins and been restored

again by the too-bright, vulgar, resplendent touch of O’Hara. It was an

immensely complicated and intricate story which went back, back into the

past and seemed to touch them all here in Durham.

“The roots of life at Pentlands,” thought Olivia, “go down, down into

the past. There are no new branches, no young, vigorous shoots.”

She came at length to the last of the letters, which had buried in its

midst the terrible revealing lines--

_If you knew what delight it gives me to have you write that the

child is ours beyond any doubt, that there cannot be the slightest

doubt of it! The baby belongs to us ... to us alone! It has nothing

to do with him. I could not bear the idea of his thinking that the

child is his if it was not that it makes your position secure. The

thought tortures me but I am able to bear it because it leaves you

safe and above suspicion._

Slowly, thoughtfully, as if unable to believe her eyes, she reread the

lines through again, and then placed her hands against her head with a

gesture of feeling suddenly weak and out of her mind.

She tried to think clearly. “Savina Pentland never had but one child, so

far as I know ... never but one. And that must have been Toby Cane’s

child.”

There could be no doubt. It was all there, in writing. The child was

the child of Toby Cane and a woman who was born Savina Dalgedo. He was

not a Pentland and none of his descendants had been Pentlands ... not

one.

They were not Pentlands at all save as the descendants of Savina and her

lover had married among the Brahmins where Pentland blood was in every

family. They were not Pentlands by blood and yet they were Pentlands

beyond any question, in conduct, in point of view, in tradition. It

occurred to Olivia for the first time how immense and terrible a thing

was that environment, that air which held them all enchanted ... all the

cloud of prejudices and traditions and prides and small anxieties. It

was a world so set, so powerful, so iron-bound that it had made

Pentlands of people like Anson and Aunt Cassia, even like her

father-in-law. It made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at

all. She saw it now as an overwhelming, terrifying power that was a part

of the old house. It stood rooted in the very soil of all the landscape

that spread itself beyond her windows.

And in the midst of this realization she had a swift impulse to laugh,

hysterically, for the picture of Anson had come to her suddenly ...

Anson pouring his whole soul into that immense glorification to be known

as “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

Slowly, as the first shock melted away a little, she began to believe

that the yellowed bits of paper were a sort of infernal machine, an

instrument with the power of shattering a whole world. What was she to

do with this thing--this curious symbol of a power that always won every

struggle in one way or another, directly as in the case of Savina and

her lover, or by taking its vengeance upon body or soul as it had done

in the case of Aunt Cassie’s poor, prying, scheming mind? And there was,

too, the dark story of Horace Pentland, and the madness of the old woman

in the north wing, and even those sudden terrible bouts of drinking

which made so fine a man as John Pentland into something very near to a

beast.

It was as if a light of blinding clarity had been turned upon all the

long procession of ancestors. She saw now that if “The Pentland Family

and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” was to have any value at all as truth

it must be rewritten in the light of the struggle between the forces

glorified by that drunken scamp Toby Cane and this other terrible force

which seemed to be all about her everywhere, pressing even herself

slowly into its own mold. It was an old struggle between those who chose

to find their pleasure in this world and those who looked for the vague

promise of a glorified future existence.

She could see Anson writing in his book, “In the present generation

(192-) there exists Cassandra Pentland Struthers (Mrs. Edward Cane

Struthers), a widow who has distinguished herself by her devotion to the

Episcopal Church and to charity and good works. She resides in winter in

Boston and in summer at her country house near Durham on the land

claimed from the wilderness by the first Pentland, distinguished founder

of the American family.”

Yes, Anson would write just those words in his book. He would describe

thus the old woman who sat belowstairs hoping all the while that Olivia

would descend bearing the news of some new tragedy ... that virginal old

woman who had ruined the whole life of her husband and kept poor

half-witted Miss Peavey a prisoner for nearly thirty years.

* * * * *

The murmur of voices died away presently and Olivia, looking out of the

window, saw that it was Aunt Cassie who had won this time. She was

standing in the garden looking down the drive with that malignant

expression which sometimes appeared on her face in moments when she

thought herself alone. Far down the shadow-speckled drive, the figure

of Sabine moved indolently away in the direction of Brook Cottage.

Sabine, too, belonged in a way to the family; she had grown up enveloped

in the powerful tradition which made Pentlands of people who were not

Pentlands at all. Perhaps (thought Olivia) the key to Sabine’s restless,

unhappy existence also lay in the same dark struggle. Perhaps if one

could penetrate deeply enough in the long family history one would find

there the reasons for Sabine’s hatred of this Durham world and the

reasons why she had returned to a people she disliked with all the

bitter, almost fanatic passion of her nature. There was in Sabine an

element of cold cruelty.

At the sight of Olivia coming down the steps into the garden, Aunt

Cassie turned and moved forward quickly with a look of expectancy,

asking, “And how is the poor thing?”

And at Olivia’s answer, “She’s quiet now ... sleeping. It’s all passed,”

the looked changed to one of disappointment.

She said, with an abysmal sigh, “Ah, she will go on forever. She’ll be

alive long after I’ve gone to join dear Mr. Struthers.”

“Invalids are like that,” replied Olivia, by way of saying something.

“They take such care of themselves.” And almost at once, she thought,

“Here I am playing the family game, pretending that she’s not mad but

only an invalid.”

She had no feeling of resentment against the busy old woman; indeed it

seemed to her at times that she had almost an affection for Aunt

Cassie--the sort of affection one has for an animal or a bit of

furniture which has been about almost as long as one can remember. And

at the moment the figure of Aunt Cassie, the distant sight of Sabine,

the bright garden full of flowers ... all these things seemed to her

melodramatic and unreal, for she was still living in the Pentlands of

Savina and Toby Cane. It was impossible to fix her attention on Aunt

Cassie and her flutterings.

The old lady was saying, “You all seem to have grown very fond of this

man O’Hara.”

(What was she driving at now?) Aloud, Olivia said, “Why not? He’s

agreeable, intelligent ... even distinguished in his way.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I’ve been discussing him with Sabine, and I’ve

come to the conclusion that I may have been wrong about him. She thinks

him a clever man with a great future.” There was a pause and she added

with an air of making a casual observation, “But what about his past? I

mean where does he come from.”

“I know all about it. He’s been telling me. That’s why I was late this

morning.”

For a time Aunt Cassie was silent, as if weighing some deep problem. At

last she said, “I was wondering about seeing too much of him. He has a

bad reputation with women.... At least, so I’m told.”

Olivia laughed. “After all, Aunt Cassie, I’m a grown woman. I can look

out for myself.”

“Yes.... I know.” She turned with a disarming smile of Christian

sweetness. “I don’t want you to think that I’m interfering, Olivia. It’s

the last thing I’d think of doing. But I was considering your own good.

It’s harmless enough, I’m sure. No one would ever think otherwise,

knowing you, my dear. But it’s what people will say. There was a scandal

I believe about eight years ago ... a road-house scandal!” She said this

with an air of great suffering, as if the words “road-house scandal”

seared her lips.

“I suppose so. Most men ... politicians, I mean ... have scandals

connected with their names. It’s part of the business, Aunt Cassie.”

And she kept thinking with amazement of the industry of the old

lady--that she should have taken the trouble of going far back into

O’Hara’s past to find some definite thing against him. She did not doubt

the ultimate truth of Aunt Cassie’s insinuation. Aunt Cassie did not lie

deliberately; there was always a grain of truth in her implications,

though sometimes the poor grain lay buried so deeply beneath

exaggerations that it was almost impossible to discover it. And a thing

like that might easily be true about O’Hara. With a man like him you

couldn’t expect women to play the rôle they played with a man like

Anson.

“It’s only on account of what people will say,” repeated Aunt Cassie.

“I’ve almost come to the conclusion that what people say doesn’t really

matter any longer....”

Aunt Cassie began suddenly to pick a bouquet from the border beside her.

“Oh, it’s not you I’m worrying about, Olivia dear. But we have to

consider others sometimes.... There’s Sybil and Anson, and even the very

name of Pentland. There’s never been any such suspicion attached to it

... ever.”

It was incredible (thought Olivia) that any one would make such a

statement, incredible anywhere else in the world. She wanted to ask,

“What about your brother and old Mrs. Soames?” And in view of those

letters that lay locked in her dressing-table....

At that moment lunch was announced by Peters’ appearance in the doorway.

Olivia turned to Aunt Cassie, “You’re staying, of course.”

“No, I must go. You weren’t expecting me.”

So Olivia began the ancient game, played for so many years, of pressing

Aunt Cassie to stay to lunch.

“It makes no difference,” she said, “only another plate.” And so on

through a whole list of arguments that she had memorized long ago. And

at last Aunt Cassie, with the air of having been pressed beyond her

endurance, yielded, and to Peters, who had also played the game for

years, Olivia said, “Lay another place for Mrs. Struthers.”

She had meant to stay all along. Lunching out saved both money and

trouble, for Miss Peavey ate no more than a bird, at least not openly;

and, besides, there were things she must find out at Pentlands, and

other things which she must plan. In truth, wild horses could not have

dragged her away.

As they entered the house, Aunt Cassie, carrying the bouquet she had

plucked, said casually, “I met the Mannering boy on the road this

morning and told him to come in to-night. I thought you wouldn’t mind.

He’s very fond of Sybil, you know.”

“No, of course not,” replied Olivia. “I don’t mind. But I’m afraid Sybil

isn’t very interested in him.”