# Early Autumn (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 1)/Chapter 9

As the month of August moved toward an end there was no longer any doubt as to the "failing" of Aunt Cassie; it was confirmed by the very silence with which she surrounded the state of her health. For forty years one had discussed Aunt Cassie's health as one discussed the weather—a thing ever present in the consciousness of man about which one could do nothing, and now Aunt Cassie ceased suddenly to speak of her health at all. She even abandoned her habit of going about on foot and took to making her round of calls in the rattling motor which she protested to fear and loathe, and she came to lean more and more heavily upon the robust Miss Peavey for companionship and support. Claiming a fear of burglars, she had Miss Peavey's bed moved into the room next to hers and kept the door open between. She developed, Olivia discovered, an almost morbid terror of being left alone.
And so the depression of another illness came to add its weight to the burden of Jack's death and the grief of John Pentland. The task of battling the cloud of melancholy which hung over the old house grew more and more heavy upon Olivia's shoulders. Anson remained as usual indifferent to any changes in the life about him, living really in the past among all the sheaves of musty papers, a man not so much cold-blooded as bloodless, for there was nothing active nor calculating in his nature, but only a great inertia, a lack ​of all fire. And it was impossible to turn to Sabine, who in an odd way seemed as cold and detached as Anson; she appeared to stand at a little distance, waiting, watching them all, even Olivia herself. And it was of course unthinkable to cloud the happiness of Sybil by going to her for support.
There was at least O'Hara, who came more and more frequently to Pentlands, now that the first visit had been made and the ice was broken. Anson encountered him once in the hallway, coldly; and he had become very friendly with old John Pentland. The two had a common interest in horses and dogs and cattle, and O'Hara, born in the Boston slums and knowing very little on any of these subjects, perhaps found the old gentleman a valuable source of information. He told Olivia, "I wouldn't come to the house except for you. I can't bear to think of you there . . . always alone . . . always troubled."
And in the evenings, while they played bridge or listened to Jean's music, she sometimes caught his eye, watching her with the old admiration, telling her that he was ready to support her no matter what happened.
A week after the encounter with Miss Peavey at the catnip-bed, Peters came to Olivia's room late in the afternoon to say, with a curious blend of respect and confidence, "He's ill again, Mrs. Pentland."
She knew what Peters meant; it was a kind of code between them. . . . The same words used so many times before.
She went quickly to the tall narrow library that smelled of dogs and apples and woodsmoke, knowing well enough what she would find there; and on opening the door she saw him at once, lying asleep in the big leather chair. The faint odor of whisky—a smell which had come long since to fill her always with a kind of horror—hung in the air, and on the mahogany desk stood three bottles, each nearly emptied. He slept quietly, one arm flung across his chest, the other ​hanging to the floor, where the bony fingers rested limply against the Turkey-red carpet. There was something childlike in the peace which enveloped him. It seemed to Olivia that he was even free now of the troubles which long ago had left their mark in the harsh, bitter lines of the old face. The lines were gone, melted away somehow, drowned in the immense quiet of this artificial death. It was only thus, perhaps, that he slept quietly, untroubled by dreams. It was only thus that he ever escaped.
Standing in the doorway she watched him for a time, quietly, and then, turning, she said to Peters, "Will you tell Higgins?" and entering the door she closed the red-plush curtains, shutting out the late afternoon sunlight.
Higgins came, as he had done so many times before, to lock the door and sit there in the room, even sleeping on the worn leather divan, until John Pentland, wakening slowly and looking about in a dazed way, discovered his groom sitting in the same room, polishing a bridle or a pair of riding-boots. The little man was never idle. Something deep inside him demanded action: he must always be doing something. And so, after these melancholy occasions, a new odor clung to the library for days . . . the fresh, clean, healthy odor of leather and harness-soap.
For two days Higgins stayed in the library, leaving it only for meals, and for two days the old lady in the north wing went unvisited. Save for this single room, there was no evidence of any change in the order of life at Pentlands. Jean, in ignorance of what had happened, came in the evenings to play. But Sabine knew; and Aunt Cassie, who never asked questions concerning the mysterious absence of her brother lest she be told the truth. Anson, as usual, noticed nothing. The only real change lay in a sudden display of ​sulking and ill-temper on the part of Miss Egan. The invincible nurse even quarreled with the cook, and was uncivil to Olivia, who thought, "What next is to happen? I shall be forced to look for a new nurse."
On the evening of the third day, just after dinner, Higgins opened the door and went in search of Olivia.
"The old gentleman is all right again," he said. "He's gone to bathe and he'd like to see you in the library in half an hour."
She found him there, seated by the big mahogany desk, bathed and spotlessly neat in clean linen; but he looked very old and weary, and beneath the tan of the leathery face there was a pallor which gave him a yellowish look. It was his habit never to refer in any way to these sad occasions, to behave always as if he had only been away for a day or two and wanted to hear what had happened during his absence.
Looking up at her, he said gravely, "I wanted to speak to you, Olivia. You weren't busy, were you? I didn't disturb you?"
"No," she said. "There's nothing. . . . Jean and Thérèse are here with Sybil. . . . That's all."
"Sybil," he repeated. "Sybil. . . . She's very happy these days, isn't she?" Olivia nodded and even smiled a little, in a warm, understanding way, so that he added, "Well, we mustn't spoil her happiness. We mustn't allow anything to happen to it."
A light came into the eyes of Olivia. "No; we mustn't," she repeated, and then, "She's a clever girl. . . . She knows what she wants from life, and that's the whole secret. Most people never know until it's too late."
A silence followed this speech, so eloquent, so full of unsaid things, that Olivia grew uneasy.
"I wanted to talk to you about . . ." he hesitated for a moment, and she saw that beneath the edge of the table his ​hands were clenched so violently that the bony knuckles showed through the brown skin. "I wanted to talk to you about a great many things." He stirred and added abruptly, "First of all, there's my will."
He opened the desk and took out a packet of papers, separating them carefully into little piles before he spoke again. There was a weariness in all his movements. "I've made some changes," he said, "changes that you ought to know about . . . and there are one or two other things." He looked at her from under the fierce, shaggy eyebrows. "You see, I haven't long to live. I've no reason to expect to live forever and I want to leave things in perfect order, as they have always been."
To Olivia, sitting in silence, the conversation became suddenly painful. With each word she felt a wall rising about her, shutting her in, while the old man went on and on with an agonizing calmness, with an air of being certain that his will would be obeyed in death as it had always been in life.
"To begin with, you will all be left very rich . . . very rich . . . something over six million dollars. And it's solid money, Olivia . . . money not made by gambling, but money that's been saved and multiplied by careful living. For seventy-five years it's been the tradition of the family to live on the income of its income. We've managed to do it somehow, and in the end we're rich . . . very rich."
As he talked he kept fingering the papers nervously, placing them in neat little piles, arranging and rearranging them.
"And, as you know, Olivia, the money has been kept in a way so that the principal could never be spent. Sybil's grandchildren will be able to touch some of it . . . that is, if you are unwise enough to leave it to them that way."
Olivia looked up suddenly. "But why me? What have I to do with it?"
​"That's what I'm coming to, Olivia dear. . . . It's because I'm leaving control of the whole fortune to you."
Suddenly, fiercely, she wanted none of it. She had a quick, passionate desire to seize all the neatly piled papers and burn them, to tear them into small bits and fling them out of the window.
"I don't want it!" she said. "Why should you leave it to me? I'm rich myself. I don't want it! I'm not a Pentland. . . . It's not my money. I've nothing to do with it." In spite of herself, there was a note of passionate resentment in her voice.
The shaggy brows raised faintly in a look of surprise.
"To whom, if not to you?" he asked.
After a moment, she said, "Why, Anson . . . to Anson, I suppose."
"You don't really think that?"
"It's his money . . . Pentland money . . . not mine. I've all the money I need and more."
"It's yours, Olivia. . . ." He looked at her sharply. "You're more a Pentland than Anson, in spite of blood . . . in spite of name. You're more a Pentland than any of them. It's your money by every right in spite of anything you can do."
("But Anson isn't a Pentland, nor you either," thought Olivia.)
"It's you who are dependable, who are careful, who are honorable, Olivia. You're the strong one. When I die, you'll be the head of the family. . . . Surely, you know that . . . already."
("I," thought Olivia, "I who have been so giddy, who am planning to betray you all. . . . I am all this!")
"If I left it to Anson, it would be wasted, lost on foolish ideas. He's no idea of business. . . . There's a screw loose in Anson. . . . He's a crank. He'd be giving away this ​good money to missionaries and queer committees . . . societies for meddling in the affairs of people. That wasn't what this fortune was made for. No, I won't have Pentland money squandered like that. . . ."
"And I," asked Olivia. "How do you know what I will do with it?"
He smiled softly, affectionately. "I know what you'll do with it, because I know you, Olivia, my dear. . . . You'll keep it safe and intact. . . . You're the Pentland of the family. You weren't when you came here, but you are now. I mean that you belong to the grand tradition of Pentlands . . . the old ones who hang out there in the hall. You're the only one left . . . for Sybil is too young. She's only a child . . . yet."
Olivia was silent, but beneath the silence there ran a torrent of cold, rebellious thoughts. Being a Pentland, then, was not a matter of blood: it was an idea, even an ideal. She thought fiercely, "I'm not a Pentland. I'm alive. I am myself. I've not been absorbed into nothing. All these years haven't changed me so much. They haven't made me into a Pentland." But for the sake of her affection, she could say none of these things. She only said, "How do you know what I'll do with it? How do you know that I mightn't squander it extravagantly—or—or even run away, taking all that was free with me. No one could stop me—no one."
He only repeated what he had said before, saying it more slowly this time, as if to impress her. "I know what you'll do with it, Olivia, because I know you, Olivia dear—you'd never do anything foolish or shameful—I know that—that's why I trust you."
And when she did not answer him, he asked, "You will accept it, won't you, Olivia? You'll have the help of a good lawyer . . . one of the best . . . John Mannering. It will please me, Olivia, and it will let the world know ​what I think of you, what you have been to me all these years . . . all that Anson has never been . . . nor my own sister, Cassie." He leaned across the table, touching her white hand gently. "You will, Olivia?"
It was impossible to refuse, impossible even to protest any further, impossible to say that in this very moment she wanted only to run away, to escape, to leave them all forever, now that Sybil was safe. Looking away, she said in a low voice, "Yes."
It was impossible to desert him now . . . an old, tired man. The bond between them was too strong; it had existed for too long, since that first day she had come to Pentlands as Anson's bride and known that it was the father and not the son whom she respected. In a way, he had imposed upon her something of his own rugged, patriarchal strength. It seemed to her that she had been caught when she meant most to escape; and she was frightened, too, by the echoing thought that perhaps she had become, after all, a Pentland . . . hard, cautious, unadventurous and a little bitter, one for whom there was no fire or glamour in life, one who worshiped a harsh, changeable, invisible goddess called Duty. She kept thinking of Sabine's bitter remark about "the lower middle-class virtues of the Pentlands" . . . the lack of fire, the lack of splendor, of gallantry. And yet this fierce old man was gallant, in an odd fashion. . . . Even Sabine knew that.
He was talking again. "It's not only money that's been left to you. . . . There's Sybil, who's still too young to be let free. . . ."
"No," said Olivia with a quiet stubbornness, "she's not too young. She's to do as she pleases. I've tried to make her wiser than I was at her age . . . perhaps wiser than I've ever been . . . even now."
"Perhaps you're right, my dear. You have been so many ​times . . . and things aren't the same as they were in my day . . . certainly not with young girls."
He took up the papers again, fussing over them in a curious, nervous way, very unlike his usual firm, unrelenting manner. She had a flash of insight which told her that he was behaving thus because he wanted to avoid looking at her. She hated confidences and she was afraid now that he was about to tell her things she preferred never to hear. She hated confidences and yet she seemed to be a person who attracted them always.
"And leaving Sybil out of it," he continued, "there's queer old Miss Haddon in Durham whom, as you know, we've taken care of for years; and there's Cassie, who's growing old and ill, I think. We can't leave her to half-witted Miss Peavey. I know my sister Cassie has been a burden to you. . . . She's been a burden to me, all my life. . . ." He smiled grimly. "I suppose you know that. . . ." Then, after a pause, he said, "But most of all, there's my wife."
His voice assumed a queer, unnatural quality, from which all feeling had been removed. It became like the voices of deaf persons who never hear the sounds they make.
"I can't leave her alone," he said. "Alone . . . with no one to care for her save a paid nurse. I couldn't die and know that there's no one to think of her . . . save that wretched, efficient Miss Egan . . . a stranger. No, Olivia . . . there's no one but you. . . . No one I can trust." He looked at her sharply, "You'll promise me to keep her here always . . . never to let them send her away? You'll promise?"
Again she was caught. "Of course," she said. "Of course I'll promise you that." What else was she to say?
"Because," he added, looking away from her once more, "because I owe her that . . . even after I'm dead. I couldn't rest if she were shut up somewhere . . . among strangers. ​You see . . . once . . . once. . . ." He broke off sharply, as if what he had been about to say was unbearable.
With Olivia the sense of uneasiness changed into actual terror. She wanted to cry out, "Stop! . . . Don't go on!" But some instinct told her that he meant to go on and on to the very end, painfully, despite anything she could do.
"It's odd," he was saying quite calmly, "but there seem to be only women left . . . no men . . . for Anson is really an old woman."
Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind of machine, he went on, "And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we needn't think of him any longer. . . . But there's Mrs. Soames. . . ." He coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great agony. "There's Mrs. Soames," he repeated. "I know that you understand about her, Olivia . . . and I'm grateful to you for having been kind and human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we've given Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty years . . . but I don't care about that. They've watched us . . . they've known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house . . . the very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world, Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my dear. They watch you . . . they see everything you do. They almost know what you think . . . and when they don't know, they make it up. That's one of the signs of a sick, decaying world . . . that they get their living vicariously . . . by watching some one else live . . . that they live always in the past. That's the only reason I ever felt sorry for Horace Pentland . . . the only reason that I ​had sympathy for him. It was cruel that he should have been born in such a place."
The bitterness ran like acid through all the speech, through the very timbre of his voice. It burned in the fierce black eyes where the fire was not yet dead. Olivia believed that she was seeing him now for the first time, in his fulness, with nothing concealed. And as she listened, the old cloud of mystery that had always hidden him from her began to clear away like the fog lifting from the marshes in the early morning. She saw him now as he really was . . . a man fiercely masculine, bitter, clear-headed, and more human than the rest of them, who had never before betrayed himself even for an instant.
"But about Mrs. Soames. . . . If anything should happen to me, Olivia . . . if I should die first, I want you to be kind to her . . . for my sake and for hers. She's been patient and good to me for so long." The bitterness seemed to flow away a little now, leaving only a kindling warmth in its place. "She's been good to me. . . . She's always understood, Olivia, even before you came here to help me. You and she, Olivia, have made life worth living for me. She's been patient . . . more patient than you know. Sometimes I must have made life for her a hell on earth . . . but she's always been there, waiting, full of gentleness and sympathy. She's been ill most of the time you've known her . . . old and ill. You can't imagine how beautiful she once was."
"I know," said Olivia softly. "I remember seeing her when I first came to Pentlands . . . and Sabine has told me."
The name of Sabine appeared to rouse him suddenly. He sat up very straight and said, "Don't trust Sabine too far, Olivia. She belongs to us, after all. She's very like my sister Cassie . . . more like her than you can imagine. It's why they hate each other so. She's Cassie turned inside out, ​as you might say. They'd both sacrifice everything for the sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them. They live . . . vicariously."
Olivia would have interrupted him, defending Sabine and telling of the one real thing that had happened to her . . . the tragic love for her husband; she would have told him of all the abrupt, incoherent confidences Sabine had made her; but the old man gave her no chance. It seemed suddenly that he had become possessed, fiercely intent upon pouring out to her all the dark things he had kept hidden for so long.
(She kept thinking, "Why must I know all these things? Why must I take up the burden? Why was it that I should find those letters which had lain safe and hidden for so long?")
He was talking again quietly, the bony fingers weaving in and out their nervous futile pattern. "You see, Olivia. . . . You see, she takes drugs now . . . and there's no use in trying to cure her. She's old now, and it doesn't really matter. It's not as if she were young with all her life before her."
Almost without thinking, Olivia answered, "I know that."
He looked up quickly. "Know it?" he asked sharply. "How could you know it?"
"Sabine told me."
The head bowed again. "Oh, Sabine! Of course! She's dangerous. She knows far too much of the world. She's known too many strange people." And then he repeated again what he had said months ago after the ball. "She ought never to have come back here."
Into the midst of the strange, disjointed conversation there came presently the sound of music drifting toward them from the distant drawing-room. John Pentland, who was a little deaf, did not hear it at first, but after a little time he sat up, listening, and turning toward her, asked, "Is that Sybil's young man?"
​"Yes."
"He's a nice boy, isn't he?"
"A very nice boy."
After a silence he asked, "What's the name of the thing he's playing?"
Olivia could not help smiling. "It's called I'm in love again and the spring is a-comin'. Jean brought it back from Paris. A friend of his wrote it . . . but names don't mean anything in music any more. No one listens to the words."
A shadow of amusement crossed his face. "Songs have queer names nowadays."
She would have escaped, then, going quietly away. She stirred and even made a gesture toward leaving, but he raised his hand in the way he had, making her feel that she must obey him as if she were a child.
"There are one or two more things you ought to know, Olivia . . . things that will help you to understand. Some one has to know them. Some one. . . ." He halted abruptly and again made a great effort to go on. The veins stood out sharply on the bony head.
"It's about her chiefly," he said, with the inevitable gesture toward the north wing. "She wasn't always that way. That's what I want to explain. You see . . . we were married when we were both very young. It was my father who wanted it. I was twenty and she was eighteen. My father had known her family always. They were cousins of ours, in a way, just as they were cousins of Sabine's. He had gone to school with her father and they belonged to the same club and she was an only child with a prospect of coming into a great fortune. It's an old story, you see, but a rather common one in our world. . . . All these things counted, and as for myself, I'd never had anything to do with women and I'd never been in love with any one. I was very young. I think they saw it as a perfect match . . . made in the hard, pros​perous Heaven of their dreams. She was very pretty . . . you can see even now that she must have been very pretty. . . . She was sweet, too, and innocent." He coughed, and continued with a great effort. "She had . . . she had a mind like a little child's. She knew nothing . . . a flower of innocence," he added with a strange savagery.
And then, as if the effort were too much for him, he paused and sat staring out of the window toward the sea. To Olivia it seemed that he had slipped back across the years to the time when the poor old lady had been young and perhaps curiously shy of his ardent wooing. A silence settled again over the room, so profound that this time the faint, distant roaring of the surf on the rocks became audible, and then again the sound of Jean's music breaking in upon them. He was playing another tune . . . not I'm in love again, but one called Ukulele Lady.
"I wish they'd stop that damned music!" said John Pentland.
"I'll go," began Olivia, rising.
"No . . . don't go. You mustn't go . . . not now." He seemed anxious, almost terrified, perhaps by the fear that if he did not tell now he would never tell her the long story that he must tell to some one. "No, don't go . . . not until I've finished, Olivia. I must finish. . . . I want you to know why such things happened as happened here yesterday and the day before in this room. . . . There's no excuse, but what I have to tell you may explain it . . . a little."
He rose and opening one of the bookcases, took out a bottle of whisky. Looking at her, he said, "Don't worry, Olivia, I shan't repeat it. It's only that I'm feeling weak. It will never happen again . . . what happened yesterday . . . never. I give you my word."
He poured out a full glass and seated himself once more, drinking the stuff slowly while he talked.
​"So we were married, I thinking that I was in love with her, because I knew nothing of such things . . . nothing. It wasn't really love, you see. . . . Olivia, I'm going to tell you the truth . . . everything . . . all of the truth. It wasn't really love, you see. It was only that she was the only woman I had ever approached in that way . . . and I was a strong, healthy young man."
He began to speak more and more slowly, as if each word were thrust out by an immense effort of will. "And she knew nothing . . . nothing at all. She was," he said bitterly, "all that a young woman was supposed to be. After the first night of the honeymoon, she was never quite the same again . . . never quite the same, Olivia. Do you know what that means? The honeymoon ended in a kind of madness, a fixed obsession. She'd been brought up to think of such things with a sacred horror and there was a touch of madness in her family. She was never the same again," he repeated in a melancholy voice, "and when Anson was born she went quite out of her head. She would not see me or speak to me. She fancied that I had disgraced her forever . . . and after that she could never be left alone without some one to watch her. She never went out again in the world. . . ."
The voice died away into a hoarse whisper. The glass of whisky had been emptied in a supreme effort to break through the shell which had closed him in from all the world, from Olivia, whom he cherished, perhaps even from Mrs. Soames, whom he had loved. In the distance the music still continued, this time as an accompaniment to the hard, loud voice of Thérèse singing, I'm in love again and the spring is a-comin'. . . . Thérèse, the dark, cynical, invincible Thérèse for whom life, from frogs to men, held very few secrets.
"But the story doesn't end there," continued John Pent​land weakly. "It goes on . . . because I came to know what being in love might be when I met Mrs. Soames. . . . Only then," he said sadly, as if he saw the tragedy from far off as a thing which had little to do with him. "Only then," he repeated, "it was too late. After what I had done to her, it was too late to fall in love. I couldn't abandon her. It was impossible. It ought never to have happened." He straightened his tough old body and added, "I've told you all this, Olivia, because I wanted you to understand why sometimes I am . . ." He paused for a moment and then plunged ahead, "why I am a beast as I was yesterday. There have been times when it was the only way I could go on living. . . . And it harmed no one. There aren't many who ever knew about it. . . . I always hid myself. There was never any spectacle."
Slowly Olivia's white hand stole across the polished surface of the desk and touched the brown, bony one that lay there now, quietly, like a hawk come to rest. She said nothing and yet the simple gesture carried an eloquence of which no words were capable. It brought tears into the burning eyes for the second time in the life of John Pentland. He had wept only once before . . . on the night of his grandson's death. And they were not, Olivia knew, tears of self-pity, for there was no self-pity in the tough, rugged old body; they were tears at the spectacle of a tragedy in which he happened by accident to be concerned.
"I wanted you to know, my dear Olivia . . . that I have never been unfaithful to her, not once in all the years since our wedding-night. . . . I know the world will never believe it, but I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me . . . and she knows that it is true."
And now that she knew the story was finished, she did not go away, because she knew that he wanted her to stay, ​sitting there beside him in silence, touching his hand. He was the sort of man—a man, she thought, like Michael—who needed women about him.
After a long time, he turned suddenly and asked, "This boy of Sybil's—who is he? What is he like?"
"Sabine knows about him."
"It's that which makes me afraid. . . . He's out of her world and I'm not so sure that I like it. In Sabine's world it doesn't matter who a person is or where he comes from as long as he's clever and amusing."
"I've watched him. . . . I've talked with him. I think him all that a girl could ask . . . a girl like Sybil, I mean. . . . I shouldn't recommend him to a silly girl . . . he'd give such a wife a very bad time. Besides, I don't think we can do much about it. Sybil, I think, has decided."
"Has he asked her to marry him? Has he spoken to you?"
"I don't know whether he's asked her. He hasn't spoken to me. Young men don't bother about such things nowadays."
"But Anson won't like it. There'll be trouble . . . and Cassie, too."
"Yes . . . and still, if Sybil wants him, she'll have him. I've tried to teach her that in a case like this . . . well," she made a little gesture with her white hand, "that she should let nothing make any difference."
He sat thoughtfully for a long time, and at last, without looking up and almost as if speaking to himself, he said, "There was once an elopement in the family. . . . Jared and Savina Pentland were married that way."
"But that wasn't a happy match . . . not too happy," said Olivia; and immediately she knew that she had come near to betraying herself. A word or two more and he might have trapped her. She saw that it was impossible to add the burden of the letters to these other secrets.
​As it was, he looked at her sharply, saying, "No one knows that. . . . One only knows that she was drowned."
She saw well enough what he meant to tell her, by that vague hint regarding Savina's elopement; only now he was back once more in the terrible shell; he was the mysterious, the false, John Pentland who could only hint but never speak directly.
The music ceased altogether in the drawing-room, leaving only the vague, distant, eternal pounding of the surf on the red rocks, and once the distant echo of a footstep coming from the north wing. The old man said presently, "So she wasn't falling in love with this man O'Hara, after all? There wasn't any need for worry?"
"No, she never thought of him in that way, even for a moment. . . . To her he seems an old man. . . . We mustn't forget how young she is."
"He's not a bad sort," replied the old man. "I've grown fond of him, and Higgins thinks he's a fine fellow. I'm inclined to trust Higgins. He has an instinct about people . . . the same as he has about the weather." He paused for a moment, and then continued, "Still, I think we'd best be careful about him. He's a clever Irishman on the make . . . and such gentlemen need watching. They're usually thinking only of themselves."
"Perhaps," said Olivia, in a whisper. "Perhaps. . . ."
The silence was broken by the whirring and banging of the clock in the hall making ready to strike eleven. The evening had slipped away quickly, veiled in a mist of unreality. At last the truth had been spoken at Pentlands—the grim, unadorned, terrible truth; and Olivia, who had hungered for it for so long, found herself shaken.
She did not go to her own room, because it would have been impossible to sleep, and she could not go to the drawing-room to face, in the mood which held her captive, such young faces as those of Jean and Thérèse and Sybil. At the moment she could not bear the thought of any enclosed place, of a room or even a place covered by a roof which shut out the open sky. She had need of the air and that healing sense of freedom and oblivion which the sight of the marshes and the sea sometimes brought to her. She wanted to breathe deeply the fresh salty atmosphere, to run, to escape somewhere. Indeed, for a moment she succumbed to a sense of panic, as she had done on the other hot night when O'Hara followed her into the garden.
She went out across the terrace and, wandering aimlessly, found herself presently moving beneath the trees in the direction of the marshes and the sea. This last night of August was hot and clear save for the faint, blue-white mist that always hung above the lower meadows. There had been times in the past when the thought of crossing the lonely meadows, of wandering the shadowed lanes in the darkness, had frightened her, but to-night such an adventure seemed only restful and quiet, perhaps because she believed that she could encounter there nothing more terrible than the confidences of John Pentland. She was acutely aware, as she had been on that other evening, of the breathless beauty of the night, of the velvety shadows along the hedges and ditches, of the brilliance of the stars, of the distant foaming white line of the sea and the rich, fertile odor of the pastures and marshes.
And presently, when she had grown a little more calm, she tried to bring some order out of the chaos that filled ​her body and spirit. It seemed to her that all life had become hopelessly muddled and confused. She was aware in some way, almost without knowing why, that the old man had tricked her, turning her will easily to his own desires, changing all the prospect of the future. She had known always that he was strong and in his way invincible, but until to-night she had never known the full greatness of his strength . . . how relentless, even how unscrupulous he could be; for he had been unscrupulous, unfair, in the way he had used every weapon at hand . . . every sentiment, every memory . . . to achieve his will. There had been no fierce struggle in the open; it was far more subtle than that. He had subdued her without her knowing it, aided perhaps by all that dark force which had the power of changing them all . . . even the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane into "Pentlands."
Thinking bitterly of what had passed, she came to see that his strength rested upon the foundation of his virtue, his rightness. One could say—indeed, one could believe it as one believed that the sun had risen yesterday—that all his life had been tragically foolish and quixotic, fantastically devoted to the hard, uncompromising ideal of what a Pentland ought to be; and yet . . . yet one knew that he had been right, even perhaps heroic; one respected his uncompromising strength. He had made a wreck of his own happiness and driven poor old Mrs. Soames to seek peace in the Nirvana of drugs; and yet for her, he was the whole of life: she lived only for him. This code of his was hard, cruel, inhuman, sacrificing everything to its observance. . . . "Even," thought Olivia, "to sacrificing me along with himself. But I will not be sacrificed. I will escape!"
And after a long time she began to see slowly what it was that lay at the bottom of the iron power he had over people, the strength which none of them had been able to resist. It ​was a simple thing . . . simply that he believed, passionately, relentlessly, as those first Puritans had done.
The others all about her did not matter. Not one of them had any power over her . . . not Anson, nor Aunt Cassie, nor Sabine, nor Bishop Smallwood. None of them played any part in the course of her life. They did not matter. She had no fear of them; rather they seemed to her now fussy and pitiful.
But John Pentland believed. It was that which made the difference.
Stumbling along half-blindly, she found herself presently at the bridge where the lane from Pentlands crossed the river on its way to Brook Cottage. Since she had been a little girl, the sight of water had exerted a strange spell upon her . . . the sight of a river, a lake, but most of all the open sea; she had always been drawn toward these things like a bit of iron toward a magnet; and now, finding herself at the bridge, she halted, and stood looking over the stone parapet in the shadow of the hawthorn-bushes that grew close to the water's edge, down on the dark, still pool below her. The water was black and in it the bright little stars glittered like diamonds scattered over its surface. The warm, rich odor of cattle filled the air, touched by the faint, ghostly perfume of the last white nympheas that bordered the pool.
And while she stood there, bathed in the stillness of the dark solitude, she began to understand a little what had really passed between them in the room smelling of whisky and saddle-soap. She saw how the whole tragedy of John Pentland and his life had been born of the stupidity, the ignorance, the hypocrisy of others, and she saw, too, that he was beyond all doubt the grandson of the Toby Cane who had written those wild passionate letters glorifying the flesh; only ​John Pentland had found himself caught in the prison of that other terrible thing—the code in which he had been trained, in which he believed. She saw now that it was not strange that he sought escape from reality by shutting himself in and drinking himself into a stupor. He had been caught, tragically, between those two powerful forces. He thought himself a Pentland and all the while there burned in him the fire that lay in Toby Cane's letters and in the wanton look that was fixed forever in the portrait of Savina Pentland. She kept seeing him as he said, "I have never been unfaithful to her, not once in all the years since our wedding-night. . . . I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me . . . and she knows that it is true."
It seemed to her that this fidelity was a terrible, a wicked, thing.
And she came to understand that through all their talk together, the thought, the idea, of Michael had been always present. It was almost as if they had been speaking all the while about Michael and herself. A dozen times the old man had touched upon it, vaguely but surely. She had no doubts that Aunt Cassie had long since learned all there was to learn from Miss Peavey of the encounter by the catnip-bed, and she was certain that she had taken the information to her brother. Still, there was nothing definite in anything Miss Peavey had seen, very little that was even suspicious. And yet, as she looked back upon her talk with the old man, it seemed to her that in a dozen ways, by words, by intonation, by glances, he had implied that he knew the secret. Even in the end when, cruelly, he had with an uncanny sureness touched the one fear, the one suspicion that marred her love for Michael, by saying in the most casual way, "Still, I think we'd better be careful of him. He's a clever ​Irishman on the make . . . and such gentlemen need watching. They're usually thinking only of themselves."
And then the most fantastic of all thoughts occurred to her . . . that all their talk together, even the painful, tragic confidence made with such an heroic effort, was directed at herself. He had done all this—he had emerged from his shell of reticence, he had humiliated his fierce pride—all to force her to give up Michael, to force her to sacrifice herself on the altar of that fantastic ideal in which he believed.
And she was afraid because he was so strong; because he had asked her to do nothing that he himself had not done.
She would never know for certain. She saw that, after all, the John Pentland she had left a little while before still remained an illusion, veiled in mystery, unfathomable to her, perhaps forever. She had not seen him at all.
Standing there on the bridge in the black shadow of the hawthorns, all sense of time or space, of the world about her, faded out of existence, so that she was aware of herself only as a creature who was suffering. She thought, "Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I have become like them, and that is why this struggle goes on and on. Perhaps if I were an ordinary person . . . sane and simple . . . like Higgins . . . there would be no struggle and no doubts, no terror of simply acting, without hesitation."
She remembered what the old man had said of a world in which all action had become paralyzed, where one was content simply to watch others act, to live vicariously. The word "sane" had come to her quite naturally and easily as the exact word to describe a state of mind opposed to that which existed perpetually at Pentlands, and the thought terrified her that perhaps this thing which one called "being a Pentland," this state of enchantment, was, after all, only a disease, a kind ​of madness that paralyzed all power of action. One came to live in the past, to acknowledge debts of honor and duty to people who had been dead for a century and more.
"Once," she thought, "I must have had the power of doing what I wanted to do, what I thought right."
And she thought again of what Sabine had said of New England as "a place where thoughts became higher and fewer," where every action became a problem of moral conduct, an exercise in transcendentalism. It was passing now, even from New England, though it still clung to the world of Pentlands, along with the souvenirs of celebrated "dear friends." Even stowing the souvenirs away in the attic had changed nothing. It was passing all about Pentlands; there was nothing of this sort in the New England that belonged to O'Hara and Higgins and the Polish mill-workers of Durham. The village itself had become a new and different place.
In the midst of this rebellion, she became aware, with that strange acuteness which seemed to touch all her senses, that she was no longer alone on the bridge in the midst of empty, mist-veiled meadows. She knew suddenly and with a curious certainty that there were others somewhere near her in the darkness, perhaps watching her, and she had for a moment a wave of the quick, chilling fear which sometimes overtook her at Pentlands at the times when she had a sense of figures surrounding her who could neither be seen nor touched. And almost at once she distinguished, emerging from the mist that blanketed the meadows, the figures of two people, a man and a woman, walking very close to each other, their arms entwined. For a moment she thought, "Am I really mad? Am I seeing ghosts in reality?" The fantastic idea occurred to her that the two figures were perhaps Savina Pentland and Toby Cane risen from their lost grave in the sea to wander across the meadows and marshes of Pentland. Moving ​through the drifting, starlit mist, they seemed vague and indistinct and watery, like creatures come up out of the water. She fancied them, all dripping and wet, emerging from the waves and crossing the white rim of beach on their way toward the big old house. . . .
The sight, strangely enough, filled her with no sense of horror, but only with fascination.
And then, as they drew nearer, she recognized the man—something at first vaguely familiar in the cocky, strutting walk. She knew the bandy legs and was filled suddenly with a desire to laugh wildly and hysterically. It was only the rabbitlike Higgins engaged in some new conquest. Quietly she stepped farther into the shadow of the hawthorns and the pair passed her, so closely that she might have reached out her hand and touched them. It was only then that she recognized the woman. It was no Polish girl from the village, this time. It was Miss Egan—the starched, the efficient Miss Egan, whom Higgins had seduced. She was leaning on him as they walked—a strange, broken, feminine Miss Egan whom Olivia had never seen before.
At once she thought, "Old Mrs. Pentland has been left alone. Anything might happen. I must hurry back to the house." And she had a quick burst of anger at the deceit of the nurse, followed by a flash of intuition which seemed to clarify all that had been happening since the hot night early in the summer when she had seen Higgins leaping the wall like a goat to escape the glare of the motor-lights. The mysterious woman who had disappeared over the wall that night was Miss Egan. She had been leaving the old woman alone night after night since then; it explained the sudden impatience and bad temper of these last two days when Higgins had been shut up with the old man.
She saw it all now—all that had happened in the past two months—in an orderly procession of events. The old woman ​had escaped, leading the way to Savina Pentland's letters, because Miss Egan had deserted her post to wander across the meadows at the call of that mysterious, powerful force which seemed to take possession of the countryside at nightfall. It was in the air again to-night, all about her . . . in the air, in the fields, the sound of the distant sea, the smell of cattle and of ripening seeds . . . as it had been on the night when Michael followed her out into the garden.
In a way, the whole chain of events was the manifestation of the disturbing force which had in the end revealed the secret of Savina's letters. It had mocked them, and now the secret weighed on Olivia as a thing which she must tell some one, which she could no longer keep to herself. It burned her, too, with the sense of possessing a terrible and shameful weapon which she might use if pushed beyond endurance.
Slowly, after the two lovers had disappeared, she made her way back again toward the old house, which loomed square and black against the deep blue of the sky, and as she walked, her anger at Miss Egan's betrayal of trust seemed to melt mysteriously away. She would speak to Miss Egan to-morrow, or the day after; in any case, the affair had been going on all summer and no harm had come of it—no harm save the discovery of Savina Pentland's letters. She felt a sudden sympathy for this starched, efficient woman whom she had always disliked; she saw that Miss Egan's life, after all, was a horrible thing—a procession of days spent in the company of a mad old woman. It was, Olivia thought, something like her own existence. . . .
And it occurred to her at the same time that it would be difficult to explain to so sharp-witted a creature as Miss Egan why she herself should have been on the bridge at such an hour of the night. It was as if everything, each little thought ​and action, became more and more tangled and hopeless, more and more intricate and complicated with the passing of each day. There was no way out save to cut the web boldly and escape.
"No," she thought, "I will not stay. . . . I will not sacrifice myself. To-morrow I shall tell Michael that when Sybil is gone, I will do whatever he wants me to do. . . ."
When she reached the house she found it dark save for the light which burned perpetually in the big hall illuminating faintly the rows of portraits; and silent save for the creakings which afflicted it in the stillness of the night.
She was wakened early, after having slept badly, with the news that Michael had been kept in Boston the night before and would not be able to ride with her as usual. When the maid had gone away she grew depressed, for she had counted upon seeing him and coming to some definite plan. For a moment she even experienced a vague jealousy, which she put away at once as shameful. It was not, she told herself, that he ever neglected her; it was only that he grew more and more occupied as the autumn approached. It was not that there was any other woman involved; she felt certain of him. And yet there remained that strange, gnawing little suspicion, placed in her mind when John Pentland had said, "He's a clever Irishman on the make . . . and such gentlemen need watching."
After all, she knew nothing of him save what he had chosen to tell her. He was a free man, independent, a buccaneer, who could do as he chose in life. Why should he ruin himself for her?
She rose at last, determined to ride alone, in the hope that the fresh morning air and the exercise would put to rout ​this cloud of morbidity which had kept possession of her from the moment she left John Pentland in the library.
As she dressed, she thought, "Day after to-morrow I shall be forty years old. Perhaps that's the reason why I feel tired and morbid. Perhaps I'm on the borderland of middle-age. But that can't be. I am strong and well and I look young, despite everything. I am tired because of what happened last night." And then it occurred to her that perhaps Mrs. Soames had known these same thoughts again and again during her long devotion to John Pentland. "No," she told herself, "whatever happens I shall never lead the life she has led. Anything is better than that . . . anything."
It seemed strange to her to awaken and find that nothing was changed in all the world about her. After what had happened the night before in the library and on the dark meadows, there should have been some mark left upon the life at Pentlands. The very house, the very landscape, should have kept some record of what had happened; and yet everything was the same. She experienced a faint shock of surprise to find the sun shining brightly, to see Higgins in the stable-yard saddling her horse and whistling all the while in an excess of high spirits, to hear the distant barking of the beagles, and to see Sybil crossing the meadow toward the river to meet Jean. Everything was the same, even Higgins, whom she had mistaken for a ghost as he crossed the mist-hung meadows a few hours earlier. It was as if there were two realities at Pentlands—one, it might have been said, of the daylight and the other of the darkness; as if one life—a secret, hidden one—lay beneath the bright, pleasant surface of a world composed of green fields and trees, the sound of barking dogs, the faint odor of coffee arising from the kitchen, and the sound of a groom whistling while he saddled a thoroughbred. It was a misfortune that chance had given her an ​insight into both the bright, pleasant world and that other dark, nebulous one. The others, save perhaps old John Pentland, saw only this bright, easy life that had begun to stir all about her.
And she reflected that a stranger coming to Pentlands would find it a pleasant, comfortable house, where the life was easy and even luxurious, where all of them were protected by wealth. He would find them all rather pleasant, normal, friendly people of a family respected and even distinguished. He would say, "Here is a world that is solid and comfortable and sound."
Yes, it would appear thus to a stranger, so it might be that the dark, fearful world existed only in her imagination. Perhaps she herself was ill, a little unbalanced and morbid . . . perhaps a little touched like the old woman in the north wing.
Still, she thought, most houses, most families, must have such double lives—one which the world saw and one which remained hidden.
As she pulled on her boots she heard the voice of Higgins, noisy and cheerful, exchanging amorous jests with the new Irish kitchen-maid, marking her already for his own.
She rode listlessly, allowing the mare to lead through the birch thicket over the cool dark paths which she and Michael always followed. The morning air did not change her spirits. There was something sad in riding alone through the long green tunnel.
When at last she came out on the opposite side by the patch of catnip where they had encountered Miss Peavey, she saw a Ford drawn up by the side of the road and a man standing beside it, smoking a cigar and regarding the engine as if he were in trouble. She saw no more than that and ​would have passed him without troubling to look a second time, when she heard herself being addressed.
"You're Mrs. Pentland, aren't you?"
She drew in the mare. "Yes, I'm Mrs. Pentland."
He was a little man, dressed rather too neatly in a suit of checkered stuff, with a high, stiff white collar which appeared to be strangling him. He wore nose-glasses and his face had a look of having been highly polished. As she turned, he took off his straw hat and with a great show of manners came forward, bowing and smiling cordially.
"Well," he said, "I'm glad to hear that I'm right. I hoped I might meet you here. It's a great pleasure to know you, Mrs. Pentland. My name is Gavin. . . . I'm by way of being a friend of Michael O'Hara."
"Oh!" said Olivia. "How do you do?"
"You're not in a great hurry, I hope?" he asked. "I'd like to have a word or two with you."
"No, I'm not in a great hurry."
It was impossible to imagine what this fussy little man, standing in the middle of the road, bowing and smiling, could have to say to her.
Still holding his hat in his hand, he tossed away the end of his cigar and said, "It's about a very delicate matter, Mrs. Pentland. It has to do with Mr. O'Hara's campaign. I suppose you know about that. You're a friend of his, I believe?"
"Why, yes," she said coldly. "We ride together."
He coughed and, clearly ill at ease, set off on a tangent from the main subject. "You see, I'm a great friend of his. In fact, we grew up together . . . lived in the same ward and fought together as boys. You mightn't think it to see us together . . . because he's such a clever one. He's made for big things and I'm not. . . . I'm . . . I'm just plain John Gavin. But we're friends, all the same, just the same as ever . . . just as if he wasn't a big man. That's one thing ​about Michael. He never goes back on his old friends, no matter how great he gets to be."
A light of adoration shone in the blue eyes of the little man. It was, Olivia thought, as if he were speaking of God; only clearly he thought of Michael O'Hara as greater than God. If Michael affected men like this, it was easy to see why he was so successful.
The little man kept interrupting himself with apologies. "I shan't keep you long, Mrs. Pentland . . . only a moment. You see I thought it was better if I saw you here instead of coming to the house." Suddenly screwing up his shiny face, he became intensely serious. "It's like this, Mrs. Pentland. . . . I know you're a good friend of his and you wish him well. You want to see him get elected . . . even though you people out here don't hold much with the Democratic party."
"Yes," said Olivia. "That's true."
"Well," he continued with a visible effort, "Michael's a good friend of mine. I'm sort of a bodyguard to him. Of course, I never come out here, I don't belong in this world. . . . I'd feel sort of funny out here."
(Olivia found herself feeling respect for the little man. He was so simple and so honest and he so obviously worshiped Michael.)
"You see . . . I know all about Michael. I've been through a great deal with him . . . and he's not himself just now. There's something wrong. He ain't interested in his work. He acts as if he'd be willing to chuck his whole career overboard . . . and I can't let him do that. None of his friends . . . can't let him do it. We can't get him to take a proper interest in his affairs. Usually, he manages everything . . . better than any one else could." He became suddenly confidential, closing one eye. "D'you know ​what I think is the matter? I've been watching him and I've got an idea."
He waited until Olivia said, "No . . . I haven't the least idea."
Cocking his head on one side and speaking with the air of having made a great discovery, he said, "Well, I think there's a woman mixed up in it."
She felt the blood mounting to her head, in spite of anything she could do. When she was able to speak, she asked, "Yes, and what am I to do?"
He moved a little nearer, still with the same air of confiding in her. "Well, this is my idea. Now, you're a friend of his . . . you'll understand. You see, the trouble is that it's some woman here in Durham . . . some swell, you see, like yourself. That's what makes it hard. He's had women before, but they were women out of the ward and it didn't make much difference. But this is different. He's all upset, and . . ." He hesitated for a moment. "Well, I don't like to say a thing like this about Michael, but I think his head is turned a little. That's a mean thing to say, but then we're all human, aren't we?"
"Yes," said Olivia softly. "Yes . . . in the end, we're all human . . . even swells like me." There was a twinkle of humor in her eye which for a moment disconcerted the little man.
"Well," he went on, "he's all upset about her and he's no good for anything. Now, what I thought was this . . . that you could find out who this woman is and go to her and persuade her to lay off him for a time . . . to go away some place . . . at least until the campaign is over. It'd make a difference. D'you see?"
He looked at her boldly, as if what he had been saying was absolutely honest and direct, as if he really had not the faintest idea who this woman was, and beneath a sense of ​anger, Olivia was amused at the crude tact which had evolved this trick.
"There's not much that I can do," she said. "It's a preposterous idea . . . but I'll do what I can. I'll try. I can't promise anything. It lies with Mr. O'Hara, after all."
"You see, Mrs. Pentland, if it ever got to be a scandal, it'd be the end of him. A woman out of the ward doesn't matter so much, but a woman out here would be different. She'd get a lot of publicity from the sassiety editors and all. . . . That's what's dangerous. He'd have the whole church against him on the grounds of immorality."
While he was speaking, a strange idea occurred to Olivia—that much of what he said sounded like a strange echo of Aunt Cassie's methods of argument.
The horse had grown impatient and was pawing the road and tossing his head; and Olivia was angry now, genuinely angry, so that she waited for a time before speaking, lest she should betray herself and spoil all this little game of pretense which Mr. Gavin had built up to keep himself in countenance. At last she said, "I'll do what I can, but it's a ridiculous thing you're asking of me."
The little man grinned. "I've been a long time in politics, Ma'am, and I've seen funnier things than this. . . ." He put on his hat, as if to signal that he had said all he wanted to say. "But there's one thing I'd like to ask . . . and that's that you never let Michael know that I spoke to you about this."
"Why should I promise . . . anything?"
He moved nearer and said in a low voice, "You know Michael very well, Mrs. Pentland. . . . You know Michael very well, and you know that he's got a bad, quick temper. If he found out that we were meddling in his affairs, he might do anything. He might chuck the whole business ​and clear out altogether. He's never been like this about a woman before. He'd do it just now. . . . That's the way he's feeling. You don't want to see him ruin himself any more than I do . . . a clever man like Michael. Why, he might be president one of these days. He can do anything he sets his will to, Ma'am, but he is, as they say, temperamental just now."
"I'll not tell him," said Olivia quietly. "And I'll do what I can to help you. And now I must go." She felt suddenly friendly toward Mr. Gavin, perhaps because what he had been telling her was exactly what she wanted most at that moment to hear. She leaned down from her horse and held out her hand, saying, "Good-morning, Mr. Gavin."
Mr. Gavin removed his hat once more, revealing his round, bald, shiny head. "Good-morning, Mrs. Pentland."
As she rode off, the little man remained standing in the middle of the road looking after her until she had disappeared. His eye glowed with the light of admiration, but as Olivia turned from the road into the meadows, he frowned and swore aloud. Until now he hadn't understood how a good politician like Michael could lose his head over any woman. But he had an idea that he could trust this woman to do what she had promised. There was a look about her . . . a look which made her seem different from most women; perhaps it was this look which had made a fool of Michael, who usually kept women in their proper places.
Grinning and shaking his head, he got into the Ford, started it with a great uproar, and set off in the direction of Boston. After he had gone a little way he halted again and got out, for in his agitation he had forgotten to close the hood.
From the moment she turned and rode away from Mr. Gavin, Olivia gave herself over to action. She saw that ​there was need of more than mere static truth to bring order out of the hazy chaos at Pentlands; there must be action as well. And she was angry now, really angry, even at Mr. Gavin for his impertinence, and at the unknown person who had been his informant. The strange idea that Aunt Cassie or Anson was somehow responsible still remained; tactics such as these were completely sympathetic to them—to go thus in Machiavellian fashion to a man like Gavin instead of coming to her. By using Mr. Gavin there would be no scene, no definite unpleasantness to disturb the enchantment of Pentlands. They could go on pretending that nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened.
But stronger than her anger was the fear that in some way they might use the same tactics to spoil the happiness of Sybil. They would, she was certain, sacrifice everything to their belief in their own rightness.
She found Jean at the house when she returned, and, closing the door of the drawing-room, she said to him, "Jean, I want to talk to you for a moment . . . alone."
He said at once, "I know, Mrs. Pentland. It's about Sybil."
There was a little echo of humor in his voice that touched and disarmed her as it always did. It struck her that he was still young enough to be confident that everything in life would go exactly as he wished it. . . .
"Yes," she said, "that was it." They sat on two of Horace Pentland's chairs and she continued. "I don't believe in meddling, Jean, only now there are circumstances . . . reasons. . . ." She made a little gesture. "I thought that if really . . . really. . . ."
He interrupted her quickly. "I do, Mrs. Pentland. We've talked it all over, Sybil and I . . . and we're agreed. We love each other. We're going to be married."
Watching the young, ardent face, she thought, "It's a nice ​face in which there is nothing mean or nasty. The lips aren't thin and tight like Anson's, nor the skin sickly and pallid the way Anson's has always been. There's life in it, and force and charm. It's the face of a man who would be good to a woman . . . a man not in the least cold-blooded."
"Do you love her . . . really?" she asked.
"I . . . I. . . . It's a thing I can't answer because there aren't words to describe it."
"Because . . . well . . . Jean, it's no ordinary case of a mother and a daughter. It's much more than that. It means more to me than my own happiness, my own life . . . because, well, because Sybil is like a part of myself. I want her to be happy. It's not just a simple case of two young people marrying. It's much more than that." There was a silence, and she asked, "How do you love her?"
He sat forward on the edge of his chair, all eagerness. "Why . . ." he began, stammering a little, "I couldn't think of living without her. It's different from anything I ever imagined. Why . . . we've planned everything . . . all our lives. If ever I lost her, it wouldn't matter what happened to me afterwards." He grinned and added, "But you see . . . people have said all that before. There aren't any words to explain . . . to make it seem as different from anything else as it seems to me."
"But you're going to take her away?"
"Yes . . . she wants to go where I go."
("They are young," thought Olivia. "They've never once thought of any one else . . . myself or Sybil's grandfather.")
Aloud she said, "That's right, Jean. . . . I want you to take her away . . . no matter what happens, you must take her away. . . ." ("And then I won't even have Sybil.")
"We're going to my ranch in the Argentine."
​"That's right. . . . I think Sybil would like that." She sighed, in spite of herself, vaguely envious of these two. "But you're so young. How can you know for certain."
A shadow crossed his face and he said, "I'm twenty-five, Mrs. Pentland . . . but that's not the only thing. . . . I was brought up, you see, among the French . . . like a Frenchman. That makes a difference." He hesitated, frowning for a moment. "Perhaps I oughtn't to tell. . . . You mightn't understand. I know how things are in this part of the world. . . . You see, I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural . . . something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I've been in love before, casually . . . the way young Frenchmen are . . . but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can't help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can't help it. If it were just . . . just something shameful and nasty, he couldn't endure it. They don't have affairs in cold blood . . . the way I've heard men talk about such things since I've come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at the thing in the light they do. It's different here. . . . I see the difference more every day."
He was talking earnestly, passionately, and when he paused for a moment she remained silent, unwilling to interrupt him until he had finished.
"What I'm trying to say is difficult, Mrs. Pentland. It's simply this . . . that I'm twenty-five, but I've had experience with life. Don't laugh! Don't think I'm just a college boy trying to make you think I'm a roué. Only what I say is true. I know about such things . . . and I'm glad because it makes me all the more certain that Sybil is the only woman in the world for me . . . the one for whom I'd sacrifice everything. And I'll know better how to make her happy, to be gentle with her . . . to understand her. I've learned now, and it's a thing which needs learning . . . ​the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love." He turned away with a sudden air of sadness. "Perhaps I shouldn't have told you all this. . . . I've told Sybil. She understands."
"No," said Olivia, "I think you're right . . . perhaps." She kept thinking of the long tragic story of John Pentland, and of Anson, who had always been ashamed of love and treated it as something distasteful. To them it had been a dark, strange thing always touched by shame. She kept thinking, despite anything she could do, of Anson's clumsy, artificial attempts at love-making, and she was swept suddenly by shame for him. Anson, so proud and supercilious, was a poor thing, inferior even to his own groom.
"But why," she asked, "didn't you tell me about Sybil sooner? Every one has seen it, but you never spoke to me."
For a moment he did not answer her. An expression of pain clouded the blue eyes, and then, looking at her directly, he said, "It's not easy to explain why. I was afraid to come to you for fear you mightn't understand, and the longer I've been here, the longer I've put it off because . . . well, because here in Durham, ancestors, family, all that, seems to be the beginning and end of everything. It seems always to be a question of who one's family is. There is only the past and no future at all. And, you see, in a way . . . I haven't any family." He shrugged his big shoulders and repeated, "In a way, I haven't any family at all. You see, my mother was never married to my father. . . . I've no blood-right to the name of de Cyon. I'm . . . I'm . . . well, just a bastard, and it seemed hopeless for me even to talk to a Pentland about Sybil."
He saw that she was startled, disturbed, but he could not have known that the look in her eyes had very little to do with shock at what he had told her; rather she was thinking what ​a weapon the knowledge would be in the hands of Anson and Aunt Cassie and even John Pentland himself.
He was talking again with the same passionate earnestness.
"I shan't let it make any difference, so long as Sybil will have me, but, you see, it's very hard to explain, because it isn't the way it seems. I want you to understand that my mother is a wonderful woman. . . . I wouldn't bother to explain, to say anything . . . except to Sybil and to you."
"Sabine has told me about her."
"Mrs. Callendar has known her for a long time. . . . They're great friends," said Jean. "She understands."
"But she never told me . . . that. You mean that she's known it all along?"
"It's not an easy thing to tell . . . especially here in Durham, and I fancy she thought it might make trouble for me . . . after she saw what had happened to Sybil and me."
He went on quickly, telling her what he had told Sybil of his mother's story, trying to make her understand what he understood, and Sabine and even his stepfather, the distinguished old de Cyon . . . trying to explain a thing which he himself knew was not to be explained. He told her that his mother had refused to marry her lover, "because in his life outside . . . the life which had nothing to do with her . . . she discovered that there were things she couldn't support. She saw that it was better not to marry him . . . better for herself and for him and, most of all, for me. . . . He did things for the sake of success—mean, dishonorable things—which she couldn't forgive . . . and so she wouldn't marry him. And now, looking back, I think she was right. It made no great difference in her life. She lived abroad . . . as a widow, and very few people—not more than two or three—ever knew the truth. He never told because, being ​a politician, he was afraid of such a scandal. She didn't want me to be brought up under such an influence, and I think she was right. He's gone on doing things that were mean and dishonorable. . . . He's still doing them to-day. You see he's a politician . . . a rather cheap one. He's a Senator now and he hasn't changed. I could tell you his name. . . . I suppose some people would think him a distinguished man . . . only I promised her never to tell it. He thinks that I'm dead. . . . He came to her once and asked to see me, to have a hand in my education and my future. There were things, he said, that he could do for me in America . . . and she told him simply that I was dead . . . that I was killed in the war." He finished in a sudden burst of enthusiasm, his face alight with affection. "But you must know her really to understand what I've been saying. Knowing her, you understand everything, because she's one of the great people . . . the strong people of the world. You see, it's one of the things which it is impossible to explain—to you or even to Sybil—impossible to explain to the others. One must know her."
If she had had any doubts or fears, she knew now that it was too late to act; she saw that it was impossible to change the wills of two such lovers as Jean and Sybil. In a way, she came to understand the story of Jean's mother more from watching him than by listening to his long explanation. There must be in her that same determination and ardor that was in her son . . . a thing in its way irresistible. And yet it was difficult; she was afraid, somehow, of this unexpected thing, perhaps because it seemed vaguely like the taint of Savina Pentland.
She said, "If no one knows this, there is no reason to tell it here. It would only make unhappiness for all concerned. It is your business alone . . . and Sybil's. The others have no right to interfere, even to know; but they will try, ​Jean . . . unless . . . unless you both do what you want . . . quickly. Sometimes I think they might do anything."
"You mean . . ." he began impatiently.
Olivia fell back upon that vague hint which John Pentland had dropped to her the night before. She said, "There was once an elopement in the Pentland family."
"You wouldn't mind that?" he asked eagerly. "You wouldn't be hurt . . . if we did it that way?"
"I shouldn't know anything about it," said Olivia quietly, "until it was too late to do anything."
"It's funny," he said; "we'd thought of that. We've talked of it, only Sybil was afraid you'd want to have a big wedding and all that. . . ."
"No, I think it would be better not to have any wedding at all . . . especially under the circumstances."
"Mrs. Callendar suggested it as the best way out. . . . She offered to lend us her motor," he said eagerly.
"You discussed it with her and yet you didn't speak to me?"
"Well, you see, she's different . . . she and Thérèse. . . . They don't belong here in Durham. Besides, she spoke of it first. She knew what was going on. She always knows. I almost think that she planned the whole thing long ago."
Olivia, looking out of the window, saw entering the long drive the antiquated motor with Aunt Cassie, Miss Peavey, her flying veils and her Pekinese.
"Mrs. Struthers is coming . . ." she said. "We mustn't make her suspicious. And you'd best tell me nothing of your plans and then . . . I shan't be able to interfere even if I wanted to. I might change my mind . . . one never knows."
He stood up and, coming over to her, took her hand and kissed it. "There's nothing to say, Mrs. Pentland . . . ex​cept that you'll be glad for what you've done. You needn't worry about Sybil. . . . I shall make her happy. . . . I think I know how."
He left her, hurrying away past the ancestors in the long hall to find Sybil, thinking all the while how odd it would seem to have a woman so young and beautiful as Mrs. Pentland for a mother-in-law. She was a charming woman (he thought in his enthusiasm), a great woman, but she was so sad, as if she had never been very happy. There was always a cloud about her.
He did not escape quickly enough, for Aunt Cassie's sharp eyes caught a glimpse of him as he left the house in the direction of the stables. She met Olivia in the doorway, kissing her and saying, "Was that Sybil's young man I saw leaving?"
"Yes," said Olivia. "We've been talking about Sybil. I've been telling him that he mustn't think of her as some one to marry."
The yellow face of Aunt Cassie lighted with a smile of approval. "I'm glad, my dear, that you're being sensible about this. I was afraid you wouldn't be, but I didn't like to interfere. I never believe any good comes of it, unless one is forced to. He's not the person for Sybil. . . . Why, no one knows anything about him. You can't let a girl marry like that . . . just any one who comes along. Besides, Mrs. Pulsifer writes me. . . . You remember her, Olivia, the Mannering boy's aunt who used to have a house in Chestnut Street. . . . Well, she lives in Paris now at the Hotel Continental, and she writes me she's discovered there's some mystery about his mother. No one seems to know much about her."
​"Why," said Olivia, "should she write you such a thing? What made her think you'd be interested?"
"Well, Kate Pulsifer and I went to school together and we still correspond now and then. I just happened to mention the boy's name when I was writing her about Sabine. She says, by the way, that Sabine has very queer friends in Paris and that Sabine has never so much as called on her or asked her for tea. And there's been some new scandal about Sabine's husband and an Italian woman. It happened in Venice. . . ."
"But he's not her husband any longer."
The old lady seated herself and went on pouring forth the news from Kate Pulsifer's letter; with each word she appeared to grow stronger and stronger, less and less yellow and worn.
("It must be," thought Olivia, "the effect of so many calamities contained in one letter.")
She saw now that she had acted only just in time and she was glad that she had lied, so flatly, so abruptly, without thinking why she had done it. For Mrs. Pulsifer was certain to go to the bottom of the affair, if for no other reason than to do harm to Sabine; she had once lived in a house on Chestnut Street with a bow-window which swept the entrance to every house. She was one of John Pentland's dead, who lived by watching others live.
From the moment she encountered Mr. Gavin on the turnpike until the tragedy which occurred two days later, life at Pentlands appeared to lose all reality for Olivia. When she thought of it long afterward, the hours became a sort of nightmare in which the old enchantment snapped and gave way to a strained sense of struggle between forces which, ​centering about herself, left her in the end bruised and a little broken, but secure.
The breathless heat of the sort which from time to time enveloped that corner of New England, leaving the very leaves of the trees hanging limp and wilted, again settled down over the meadows and marshes, and in the midst of the afternoon appeared the rarest of sights—the indolent Sabine stirring in the burning sun. Olivia watched her coming across the fields, protected from the blazing sun only by the frivolous yellow parasol. She came slowly, indifferently, and until she entered the cool, darkened drawing-room she appeared the familiar bored Sabine; only after she greeted Olivia the difference appeared.
She said abruptly, "I'm leaving day after to-morrow," and instead of seating herself to talk, she kept wandering restlessly about the room, examining Horace Pentland's bibelots and turning the pages of books and magazines without seeing them.
"Why?" asked Olivia. "I thought you were staying until October."
"No, I'm going away at once." She turned and murmured, "I've hated Durham always. It's unbearable to me now. I'm bored to death. I only came, in the first place, because I thought Thérèse ought to know her own people. But it's no good. She'll have none of them. I see now how like her father she is. They're not her own people and never will be. . . . I don't imagine Durham will ever see either of us again."
Olivia smiled. "I know it's dull here."
"Oh, I don't mean you, Olivia dear, or even Sybil or O'Hara, but there's something in the air. . . . I'm going to Newport for two weeks and then to Biarritz for October. Thérèse wants to go to Oxford." She grinned sardonically. "There's a bit of New England in her, after all . . . this ​education business. I wanted a femme du monde for a daughter and God and New England sent me a scientist who would rather wear flat heels and look through a microscope. It's funny how children turn out."
("Even Thérèse and Sabine," thought Olivia. "Even they belong to it.")
She watched Sabine, so worldly, so superbly dressed, so hard—such a restless nomad; and as she watched her it occurred to her again that she was very like Aunt Cassie—an Aunt Cassie in revolt against Aunt Cassie's gods, an Aunt Cassie, as John Pentland had said, "turned inside out."
Without looking up from the pages of the Nouvelle Revue, Sabine said, "I'm glad this thing about Sybil is settled."
"Yes."
"He told you about his mother?"
"Yes."
"You didn't let that make any difference? You didn't tell the others?"
"No. . . . Anything I had to say would have made no difference."
"You were wise. . . . I think Thérèse is right, perhaps . . . righter than any of us. She says that nature has a contempt for marriage certificates. Respectability can't turn decay into life . . . and Jean is alive. . . . So is his mother."
"I know what you are driving at."
"Certainly, my dear, you ought to know. You've suffered enough from it. And knowing his mother makes a difference. She's no ordinary light woman, or even one who was weak enough to allow herself to be seduced. Once in fifty years there occurs a woman who can . . . how shall I say it? . . . get away with a thing like that. You have to be a great woman to do it. I don't think it's made much difference in her life, chiefly because she's a woman of discre​tion and excellent taste. But it might have made a difference in Jean's life if he had encountered a mother less wise than yourself."
"I don't know whether I'm being wise or not. I believe in him and I want Sybil to escape."
Olivia understood that for the first time they were discussing the thing which none of them ever mentioned, the thing which up to now Sabine had only touched upon by insinuation. Sabine had turned away and stood looking out of the window across the meadows where the distant trees danced in waves of heat.
"You spoiled my summer a bit, Olivia dear, by taking away my Irish friend from me."
Suddenly Olivia was angry as she was angry sometimes at the meddling of Aunt Cassie. "I didn't take him away. I did everything possible to avoid him . . . until you came. It was you who threw us together. That's why we're all in a tangle now." And she kept thinking what a strange woman Sabine Callendar really was, how intricate and unfathomable. She knew of no other woman in the world who could talk thus so dispassionately, so without emotion.
"I thought I'd have him to amuse," she was saying, "and instead of that he only uses me as a confidante. He comes to me for advice about another woman. And that, as you know, isn't very interesting. . . ."
Olivia sat suddenly erect. "What does he say? What right has he to do such a thing?"
"Because I've asked him to. When I first came here, I promised to help him. You see, I'm very friendly with you both. I want you both to be happy and . . . besides I can think of nothing happening which could give me greater pleasure."
When Olivia did not answer her, she turned from the ​window and asked abruptly, "What are you going to do about him?"
Again Olivia thought it best not to answer, but Sabine went on pushing home her point relentlessly, "You must forgive me for speaking plainly, but I have a great affection for you both . . . and I . . . well, I have a sense of conscience in the affair."
"You needn't have. There's nothing to have a conscience about."
"You're not being very honest."
Suddenly Olivia burst out angrily, "And why should it concern you, Sabine . . . in the least? Why should I not do as I please, without interference?"
"Because, here . . . and you know this as well as I do . . . here such a thing is impossible."
In a strange fashion she was suddenly afraid of Sabine, perhaps because she was so bent upon pushing things to a definite solution. It seemed to Olivia that she herself was losing all power of action, all capacity for anything save waiting, pretending, doing nothing.
"And I'm interested," continued Sabine slowly, "because I can't bear the tragic spectacle of another John Pentland and Mrs. Soames."
"There won't be," said Olivia desperately. "My father-in-law is different from Michael."
"That's true. . . ."
"In a way . . . a finer man." She found herself suddenly in the amazing position of actually defending Pentlands.
"But not," said Sabine with a terrifying reasonableness, "so wise a one . . . or one so intelligent."
"No. It's impossible to say. . . ."
"A thing like this is likely to come only once to a woman."
("Why does she keep repeating the very things that I've ​been fighting all along," thought Olivia.) Aloud she said, "Sabine, you must leave me in peace. It's for me alone to settle."
"I don't want you to do a thing you will regret the rest of your life . . . bitterly."
"You mean. . . ."
"Oh, I mean simply to give him up."
Again Olivia was silent, and Sabine asked suddenly, "Have you had a call from a Mr. Gavin? A gentleman with a bald head and a polished face?"
Olivia looked at her sharply. "How could you know that?"
"Because I sent him, my dear . . . for the same reason that I'm here now . . . because I wanted you to do something . . . to act. And I'm confessing now because I thought you ought to know the truth, since I'm going away. Otherwise you might think Aunt Cassie or Anson had done it . . . and trouble might come of that."
Again Olivia said nothing; she was lost in a sadness over the thought that, after all, Sabine was no better than the others.
"It's not easy to act in this house," Sabine was saying. "It's not easy to do anything but pretend and go on and on until at last you are an old woman and die. I did it to help you . . . for your own good."
"That's what Aunt Cassie always says."
The shaft went home, for it silenced Sabine, and in the moment's pause Sabine seemed less a woman than an amazing, disembodied, almost malevolent force. When she answered, it was with a shrug of the shoulders and a bitter smile which seemed doubly bitter on the frankly painted lips. "I suppose I am like Aunt Cassie. I mightn't have been, though. . . . I might have been just a pleasant normal person . . . like Higgins or one of the servants."
​The strange speech found an echo in Olivia's heart. Lately the same thought had come to her again and again—if only she could be simple like Higgins or the kitchen-maid. Such a state seemed to her at the moment the most desirable thing in the world. It was perhaps this strange desire which led Sabine to surround herself with what Durham called "queer people," who were, after all, simply people like Higgins and the kitchen-maid who happened to occupy a higher place in society.
"The air here needs clearing," Sabine was saying. "It needs a thunderstorm, and it can be cleared only by acting. . . . This affair of Jean and Sybil will help. We are all caught up in a tangle of thoughts and ideas . . . which don't matter. . . . You can do it, Olivia. You can clear the air once and for all."
Then for the first time Olivia thought she saw what lay behind all this intriguing of Sabine; for a moment she fancied that she saw what it was Sabine wanted more passionately than anything else in the world.
Aloud she said it, "I could clear the air, but it would also be the destruction of everything."
Sabine looked at her directly. "Well? . . . and would you be sorry? Would you count it a loss? Would it make any difference?"
Impulsively she touched Sabine's hand. "Sabine," she said, without looking at her, "I'm fond of you. You know that. Please don't talk any more about this . . . please, because I want to go on being fond of you . . . and I can't otherwise. It's our affair, mine and Michael's . . . and I'm going to settle it, to-night perhaps, as soon as I can have a talk with him. . . . I can't go on any longer."
Taking up the yellow parasol, Sabine asked, "Do you expect me for dinner to-night?"
"Of course, more than ever to-night. . . . I'm sorry you've ​decided to go so soon. . . . It'll be dreary without you or Sybil."
"You can go, too," said Sabine quickly. "There is a way. He'd give up everything for you . . . everything. I know that." Suddenly she gave Olivia a sharp look. "You're thirty-eight, aren't you?"
"Day after to-morrow I shall be forty!"
Sabine was tracing the design of roses on Horace Pentland's Savonnerie carpet with the tip of her parasol. "Gather them while you may," she said and went out into the blazing heat to cross the meadows to Brook Cottage.
Left alone, Olivia knew she was glad that day after to-morrow Sabine would no longer be here. She saw now what John Pentland meant when he said, "Sabine ought never to have come back here."
The heat clung on far into the evening, penetrating with the darkness even the drawing-room where they sat—Sabine and John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames and Olivia—playing bridge for the last time, and as the evening wore on the game went more and more badly, with the old lady forgetting her cards and John Pentland being patient and Sabine sitting in a controlled and sardonic silence, with an expression on her face which said clearly, "I can endure this for to-night because to-morrow I shall escape again into the lively world."
Jean and Sybil sat for a time at the piano, and then fell to watching the bridge. No one spoke save to bid or to remind Mrs. Soames that it was time for her shaking hands to distribute the cards about the table. Even Olivia's low, quiet voice sounded loud in the hot stillness of the old room.
At nine o'clock Higgins appeared with a message for Olivia—that Mr. O'Hara was being detained in town and that if ​he could get away before ten he would come down and stop at Pentlands if the lights were still burning in the drawing-room. Otherwise he would not be down to ride in the morning.
Once during a pause in the game Sabine stirred herself to say, "I haven't asked about Anson's book. He must be near to the end."
"Very near," said Olivia. "There's very little more to be done. Men are coming to-morrow to photograph the portraits. He's using them to illustrate the book."
At eleven, when they came to the end of a rubber, Sabine said, "I'm sorry, but I must stop. I must get up early to-morrow to see about the packing." And turning to Jean she said, "Will you drive me home? Perhaps Sybil will ride over with us for the air. You can bring her back."
At the sound of her voice, Olivia wanted to cry out, "No, don't go. You mustn't leave me now . . . alone. You mustn't go away like this!" But she managed to say quietly, in a voice which sounded far away, "Don't stay too late, Sybil," and mechanically, without knowing what she was doing, she began to put the cards back again in their boxes.
She saw that Sabine went out first, and then John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames, and that Jean and Sybil remained behind until the others had gone, until John Pentland had helped the old lady gently into his motor and driven off with her. Then, looking up with a smile which somehow seemed to give her pain she said, "Well?"
And Sybil, coming to her side, kissed her and said in a low voice, "Good-by, darling, for a little while. . . . I love you. . . ." And Jean kissed her in a shy fashion on both cheeks.
She could find nothing to say. She knew Sybil would come back, but she would be a different Sybil, a Sybil who was a woman, no longer the child who even at eighteen some​times had the absurd trick of sitting on her mother's knee. And she was taking away with her something that until now had belonged to Olivia, something which she could never again claim. She could find nothing to say. She could only follow them to the door, from where she saw Sabine already sitting in the motor as if nothing in the least unusual were happening; and all the while she wanted to go with them, to run away anywhere at all.
Through a mist she saw them turning to wave to her as the motor drove off, to wave gaily and happily because they were at the beginning of life. . . . She stood in the doorway to watch the motor-lights slipping away in silence down the lane and over the bridge through the blackness to the door of Brook Cottage. There was something about Brook Cottage . . . something that was lacking from the air of Pentlands: it was where Toby Cane and Savina Pentland had had their wanton meetings.
In the still heat the sound of the distant surf came to her dimly across the marshes, and into her mind came absurdly words she had forgotten for years. . . . "The breaking waves dashed high on the stern and rockbound coast." Against the accompaniment of the surf, the crickets and katydids (harbingers of autumn) kept up a fiddling and singing; and far away in the direction of Marblehead she watched the eye of a lighthouse winking and winking. She was aware of every sight and sound and odor of the breathless night. It might storm, she thought, before they got into Connecticut. They would be motoring all the night. . . .
The lights of Sabine's motor were moving again now, away from Brook Cottage, through O'Hara's land, on and on in the direction of the turnpike. In the deep hollow by the river they disappeared for a moment and then were to be seen once more against the black mass of the hill crowned by the town burial-ground. And then abruptly they were gone, ​leaving only the sound of the surf and the music of the crickets and the distant, ironically winking lighthouse.
She kept seeing them, side by side in the motor racing through the darkness, oblivious to all else in the world save their own happiness. Yes, something had gone away from her forever. . . . She felt a terrible, passionate envy that was like a physical pain, and all at once she knew that she was terribly alone standing in the darkness before the door of the old house.
She was roused by the sound of Anson's voice asking, "Is that you, Olivia?"
"Yes."
"What are you doing out there?"
"I came out for some air."
"Where's Sybil?"
For a moment she did not answer, and then quite boldly she said, "She's ridden over with Jean to take Sabine home."
"You know I don't approve of that." He had come through the hall now and was standing near her.
"It can't do any harm."
"That's been said before. . . ."
"Why are you so suspicious, Anson, of your own child?" She had no desire to argue with him. She wanted only to be left in peace, to go away to her room and lie there alone in the darkness, for she knew now that Michael was not coming.
"Olivia," Anson was saying, "come inside for a moment. I want to talk to you."
"Very well . . . but please don't be disagreeable. I'm very tired."
"I shan't be disagreeable. . . . I only want to settle something."
​She knew then that he meant to be very disagreeable, and she told herself that she would not listen to him; she would think of something else while he was speaking—a trick she had learned long ago. In the drawing-room she sat quietly and waited for him to begin. Standing by the mantelpiece, he appeared more tired and yellow than usual. She knew that he had worked on his book; she knew that he had poured all his vitality, all his being, into it; but as she watched him her imagination again played her the old trick of showing her Michael standing there in his place . . . defiant, a little sulky, and filled with a slow, steady, inexhaustible force.
"It's chiefly about Sybil," he said. "I want her to give up seeing this boy."
"Don't be a martinet, Anson. Nothing was ever gained by it."
(She thought, "They must be almost to Salem by now.") And aloud she added, "You're her father, Anson; why don't you speak?"
"It's better for you. I've no influence with her."
"I have spoken," she said, thinking bitterly that he could never guess what she meant.
"And what's the result? Look at her, going off at this hour of the night. . . ."
She shrugged her shoulders, filled with a warm sense of having outwitted the enemy, for at the moment Anson seemed to her an enemy not only of herself, but of Jean and Sybil, of all that was young and alive in the world.
"Besides," he was saying, "she hasn't proper respect for me . . . her father. Sometimes I think it's the ideas she got from you and from going abroad to school."
"What a nasty thing to say! But if you want the truth, I think it's because you've never been a very good father. Sometimes I've thought you never wanted children. You've never paid much attention to them . . . not even to Jack ​. . . while he was alive. It wasn't ever as if they were our children. You've always left them to me . . . alone."
The thin neck stiffened a little and he said, "There are reasons for that. I'm a busy man. . . . I've given most of my time, not to making money, but to doing things to better the world in some way. If I've neglected my children it's been for a good reason . . . few men have as much on their minds. And there's been the book to take all my energies. You're being unjust, Olivia. You never could see me as I am."
"Perhaps," said Olivia. (She wanted to say, "What difference does the book make to any one in the world? Who cares whether it is written or not?") She knew that she must keep up her deceit, so she said, "You needn't worry, because Sabine is going away to-morrow and Jean will go with her." She sighed. "After that your life won't be disturbed any longer. Nothing in the least unusual is likely to happen."
"And there's this other thing," he said, "this disloyalty of yours to me and to all the family."
Stiffening slightly, she asked, "What can you mean by that?"
"You know what I mean."
She saw that he was putting himself in the position of a wronged husband, assuming a martyrdom of the sort which Aunt Cassie practised so effectively. He meant to be a patient, well-meaning husband and to place her in the position of a shameful woman; and slowly, with a slow, heavy anger, she resolved to circumvent his trick.
"I think, Anson, that you're talking nonsense. I haven't been disloyal to any one. Your father will tell you that."
"My father was always weak where women are concerned, and now he's beginning to grow childish. He's so old that he's beginning to forgive and condone anything." And then ​after a silence he said, "This O'Hara. I'm not such a fool as you think, Olivia."
For a long time neither of them said anything, and in the end it was Olivia who spoke, striking straight into the heart of the question. She said, "Anson, would you consider letting me divorce you?"
The effect upon him was alarming. His face turned gray, and the long, thin, oversensitive hands began to tremble. She saw that she had touched him on the rawest of places, upon his immense sense of pride and dignity. It would be unbearable for him to believe that she would want to be rid of him in order to go to another man, especially to a man whom he professed to hold in contempt, a man who had the qualities which he himself did not possess. He could only see the request as a humiliation of his own precious dignity.
He managed to grin, trying to turn the request to mockery, and said, "Have you lost your mind?"
"No, Anson, not for a moment. What I ask is a simple thing. It has been done before."
He did not answer her at once, and began to move about the room in the deepest agitation, a strange figure curiously out of place in the midst of Horace Pentland's exotic, beautiful pictures and chairs and bibelots—as wrong in such a setting as he had been right a month or two earlier among the museum of Pentland family relics.
"No," he said again and again. "What you ask is preposterous! To-morrow when you are less tired you will see how ridiculous it is. No . . . I couldn't think of such a thing!"
She made an effort to speak quietly. "Is it because you don't want to put yourself in such a position?"
"It has nothing to do with that. Why should you want a divorce? We are well off, content, comfortable, happy. . . ."
She interrupted him, asking, "Are we?"
​"What is it you expect, Olivia . . . to live always in a sort of romantic glow? We're happier than most."
"No," she said slowly. "I don't think happiness has ever meant much to you, Anson. Perhaps you're above such things as happiness and unhappiness. Perhaps you're more fortunate than most of us. I doubt if you have ever known happiness or unhappiness, for that matter. You've been uncomfortable when people annoyed you and got in your way, but . . . that's all. Nothing more than that. Happiness . . . I mean it in the sensible way . . . has sometimes to do with delight in living, and I don't think you've ever known that, even for a moment."
He turned toward her saying, "I've been an honest, God-fearing, conscientious man, and I think you're talking nonsense!"
"No, not for a moment. . . . Heaven knows I ought to know the truth of what I've been saying."
Again they reached an impasse in the conversation and again they both remained silent, disturbed perhaps and uneasy in the consciousness that between them they had destroyed something which could never be restored; and yet with Olivia there was a cold, sustained sense of balance which came to her miraculously at such times. She felt, too, that she stood with her back against a wall, fighting. At last she said, "I would even let you divorce me—if that would be easier for you. I don't mind putting myself in the wrong."
Again he began to tremble. "Are you trying to tell me that. . . ."
"I'm not telling you anything. There hasn't been anything at all . . . but . . . but I would give you grounds if you would agree."
He turned away from her in disgust. "That is even more impossible. . . . A gentleman never divorces his wife."
"Let's leave the gentlemen out of it, Anson," she said. ​"I'm weary of hearing what gentlemen do and do not do. I want you to act as yourself, as Anson Pentland, and not as you think you ought to act. Let's be honest. You know you married me only because you had to marry some one . . . and I . . . I wasn't actually disreputable, even, as you remind me, if my father was shanty Irish. And . . . let's be just too. I married you because I was alone and frightened and wanted to escape a horrible life with Aunt Alice. . . . I wanted a home. That was it, wasn't it? We are both guilty, but that doesn't change the reality in the least. No, I fancy you practised loving me through a sense of duty. You tried it as long as you could and you hated it always. Oh, I've known what was going on. I've been learning ever since I came to Pentlands for the first time."
He was regarding her now with a fixed expression of horrid fascination; he was perhaps even dazed at the sound of her voice, slowly, resolutely, tearing aside all the veils of pretense which had made their life possible for so long. He kept mumbling, "How can you talk this way? How can you say such things?"
Slowly, terribly, she went on and on: "We're both guilty . . . and it's been a failure, from the very start. I've tried to do my best and perhaps sometimes I've failed. I've tried to be a good mother . . . and now that Sybil is grown and Jack . . . is dead, I want a chance at freedom. I'm still young enough to want to live a little before it is too late."
Between his teeth he said, "Don't be a fool, Olivia. . . . You're forty years old. . . ."
"You needn't remind me of that. To-morrow I shall be forty. I know it . . . bitterly. But my being forty makes no difference to you. To you it would be all the same if I were seventy. But to me it makes a difference . . . a great difference." She waited a moment, and then said, "That's ​the truth, Anson; and it's the truth that interests me to-night. Let me be free, Anson. . . . Let me go while being free still means something."
Perhaps if she had thrown herself at his feet in the attitude of a wretched, shameful woman, if she had made him feel strong and noble and heroic, she would have won; but it was a thing she could not do. She could only go on being coldly reasonable.
"And you would give up all this?" he was saying. "You'd leave Pentlands and all it stands for to marry this cheap Irishman . . . a nobody, the son perhaps of an immigrant dock-laborer."
"He is the son of a dock-laborer," she answered quietly. "And his mother was a housemaid. He's told me so himself. And as to all this. . . . Why, Anson, it doesn't mean anything to me . . . nothing at all that I can't give up, nothing which means very much. I'm fond of your father, Anson, and I'm fond of you when you are yourself and not talking about what a gentleman would do. But I'd give it all up . . . everything . . . for the sake of this other thing."
For a moment his lips moved silently and in agitation, as if it were impossible for him to answer things so preposterous as those his wife had just spoken. At last he was able to say, "I think you must have lost your mind, Olivia . . . to even think of asking such a thing of me. You've lived here long enough to know how impossible it is. Some of us must make a stand in a community. There has never been a scandal, or even a divorce, in the Pentland family . . . never. We've come to stand for something. Three hundred years of clean, moral living can't be dashed aside so easily. . . . We're in a position where others look up to us. Can't you see that? Can't you understand such a responsibility?"
For a moment she had a terrible, dizzy, intoxicating sense of power, of knowing that she held the means of destroying ​him and all this whited structure of pride and respectability. She had only to begin by saying, "There was Savina Pentland and her lover. . . ." The moment passed quickly and at once she knew that it was a thing she could not do. Instead, she murmured, "Ah, Anson, do you think the world really looks at us at all? Do you think it really cares what we do or don't do? You can't be as blind as that."
"I'm not blind . . . only there's such a thing as honor and tradition. We stand for something. . . ."
She interrupted him. "For what?"
"For decency, for a glorious past, for stability . . . for endless things . . . all the things which count in a civilized community."
He really believed what he was saying; she knew that he must have believed it to have written all those thousands of dull, laborious words in glorification of the past.
He went on. "No, what you ask is impossible. You knew it before you asked. . . . And it would be a kindness to me if you never mentioned it again."
He was still pale, but he had gained control of himself and his hands no longer trembled; as he talked, as his sense of virtue mounted, he even grew eloquent, and his voice took on a shade of that unction which had always colored the voice of the Apostle to the Genteel and made of him a celebrated and fashionable cleric. Perhaps for the first time since his childhood, since the days when the red-haired little Sabine had mocked his curls and velvet suits, he felt himself a strong and powerful person. There was a kind of fierce intoxication in the knowledge of his power over Olivia. In his virtuous ardor he seemed for a moment to become a positive, almost admirable person.
At length she said quietly, "And what if I should simply go away . . . without bothering about a divorce?"
The remark shattered all his confidence once more; and ​she knew that she had struck at the weakest point in all his defense—the fear of a scandal. "You wouldn't do that!" he cried. "You couldn't—you couldn't behave like a common prostitute!"
"Loving one man is not behaving like a common prostitute. . . . I never loved any other."
"You couldn't bring such a disgrace on Sybil, even if you don't care for the rest of us."
("He knew, then, that I couldn't do such a thing, that I haven't the courage. He knows that I've lived too long in this world.") Aloud she said, "You don't know me, Anson. . . . In all these years you've never known me at all."
"Besides," he added quickly, "he wouldn't do such a thing. Such a climber isn't likely to throw over his whole career by running away with a woman. You'd find out if you asked him."
"But he is willing. He's already told me so. Perhaps you can't understand such a thing." When he did not answer, she said ironically, "Besides, I don't think a gentleman would talk as you are talking. No, Anson. . . . I don't think you know what the world is. You've lived here always, shut up in your own little corner." Rising, she sighed and murmured, "But there's no use in talk. I am going to bed. . . . I suppose we must struggle on as best we can . . . but there are times . . . times like to-night when you make it hard for me to bear it. Some day . . . who knows . . . there's nothing any longer to keep me. . . ."
She went away without troubling to finish what she had meant to say, lost again in an overwhelming sense of the futility of everything. She felt, she thought, like an idiot standing in the middle of an empty field, making gestures.