# Early Autumn (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 1)/Chapter 7

The news reached Aunt Cassie only the next morning at ten and it brought her, full of reproaches and tears, over the dusty lanes to Pentlands. She was hurt, she said, because they had not let her know at once. "I should have risen from my bed and come over immediately," she repeated. "I was sleeping very badly, in any case. I could have managed everything. You should have sent for Aunt Cassie at once."
And Olivia could not tell her that they had kept her in ignorance for that very reason—because they knew she would rise from her bed and come over at once.
Aunt Cassie it was who took the burden of the grief upon her narrow shoulders. She wept in the manner of a professional mourner. She drew the shades in the drawing-room, because in her mind death was not respectable unless the rooms were darkened, and sat there in a corner receiving callers, as if she were the one most bereft, as if indeed she were the only one who suffered at all. She returned to her own cupolaed dwelling only late at night and took all her meals at Pentlands, to the annoyance of her brother, who on the second day in the midst of lunch turned to her abruptly and said: "Cassie, if you can't stop this eternal blubbering, I wish you'd eat at home. It doesn't help anything."
At which she had risen from the table, in a sudden climax of grief and persecution, to flee, sobbing and hurt, from the room. But she was not insulted sufficiently to take her meals ​at home. She stayed on at Pentlands because, she said, "They needed some one like me to help out. . . ." And to the trembling, inefficient Miss Peavey, who came and went like a frightened rabbit on errands for her, she confided her astonishment that her brother and Olivia should treat death with such indifference. They did not weep; they showed no signs of grief. She was certain that they lacked sensibility. They did not feel the tragedy. And, weeping again, she would launch into memories of the days when the boy had come as a little fellow to sit, pale and listless, on the floor of her big, empty drawing-room, turning the pages of the Doré Bible.
And to Miss Peavey she also said, "It's at times like this that one's breeding comes out. Olivia has failed for the first time. She doesn't understand the things one must do at a time like this. If she had been brought up properly, here among us. . . ."
For with Aunt Cassie death was a mechanical, formalized affair which one observed by a series of traditional gestures.
It was a remarkable bit of luck, she said, that Bishop Smallwood (Sabine's Apostle to the Genteel) was still in the neighborhood and could conduct the funeral services. It was proper that one of Pentland blood should bury a Pentland (as if no one else were quite worthy of such an honor). And she went to see the Bishop to discuss the matter of the services. She planned that immensely intricate affair, the seating of relations and connections—all the Canes and Struthers and Mannerings and Sutherlands and Pentlands—at the church. She called on Sabine to tell her that whatever her feelings about funerals might be, it was her duty to attend this one. Sabine must remember that she was back again in a world of civilized people who behaved as ladies and gentlemen. And to each caller whom she received in the darkened drawing-room, she confided the fact that Sabine must be an unfeeling, inhuman creature, because she had not even paid a visit to Pentlands.
​But she did not know what Olivia and John Pentland knew—that Sabine had written a short, abrupt, almost incoherent note, with all the worn, tattered, pious old phrases missing, which had meant more to them than any of the cries and whispering and confusion that went on belowstairs, where the whole countryside passed in and out in an endless procession.
When Miss Peavey was not at hand to run errands for her, she made Anson her messenger. . . . Anson, who wandered about helpless and lost and troubled because death had interrupted the easy, eventless flow of a life in which usually all moved according to a set plan. Death had upset the whole household. It was impossible to know how Anson Pentland felt over the death of his son. He did not speak at all, and now that "The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony" had been laid aside in the midst of the confusion and Mr. Lowell's desk stood buried beneath floral offerings, there was nothing to do but wander about getting in the way of every one and drawing upon his head the sharp reproofs of Aunt Cassie.
It was Aunt Cassie and Anson who opened the great box of roses that came from O'Hara. It was Aunt Cassie's thin, blue-veined hand that tore open the envelope addressed plainly to "Mrs. Anson Pentland." It was Aunt Cassie who forced Anson to read what was written inside:
"Dear Mrs. Pentland,
You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more.
Michael O'Hara."
And it was Aunt Cassie who said, "Impertinent! Why should he send flowers at all?" And Aunt Cassie who read the note again and again, as if she might find in some way a veiled meaning behind the two cryptic sentences. It was Aunt ​Cassie who carried the note to Olivia and watched her while she read it and laid it quietly aside on her dressing-table. And when she had discovered nothing she said to Olivia, "It seems to me impertinent of him to send flowers and write such a note. What is he to us here at Pentlands?"
Olivia looked at her a little wearily and said, "What does it matter whether he is impertinent or not? Besides, he was a great friend of Jack's." And then, straightening her tired body, she looked at Aunt Cassie and said slowly, "He is also a friend of mine."
It was the first time that the division of forces had stood revealed, even for a second, the first time that Olivia had shown any feeling for O'Hara, and there was something ominous in the quietness of a speech made so casually. She ended any possible discussion by leaving the room in search of Anson, leaving Aunt Cassie disturbed by the sensation of alarm which attacked her when she found herself suddenly face to face with the mysterious and perilous calm that sometimes took possession of Olivia. Left alone in the room, she took up the note again from the dressing-table and read it through for the twentieth time. There was nothing in it . . . nothing on which one could properly even pin a suspicion.
So, in the midst of death, enveloped by the odor of tuberoses, the old lady rose triumphant, a phoenix from ashes. In some way she found in tragedy her proper rôle and she managed to draw most of the light from the other actors to herself. She must have known that people went away from the house saying, "Cassie rises to such occasions beautifully. She has taken everything on her own shoulders." She succeeded in conveying the double impression that she suffered far more than any of the others and that none of the others could possibly have done without her.
And then into the midst of her triumph came the worst that could have happened. Olivia was the first to learn of the ​calamity as she always came to know before any of the others knowledge which old John Pentland possessed; and the others would never have known until the sad business of the funeral was over save for Aunt Cassie's implacable curiosity.
On the second day, Olivia, summoned by her father-in-law to come to the library, found him there as she had found him so many times before, grim and silent and repressed, only this time there was something inexpressibly tragic and broken in his manner.
She did not speak to him; she simply waited until, looking up at last, he said almost in a whisper, "Horace Pentland's body is at the Durham station."
And he looked at her with the quick, pitiful helplessness of a strong man who has suddenly grown weak and old, as if at last he had come to the end of his strength and was turning now to her. It was then for the first time that she began to see how she was in a way a prisoner, that from now on, as one day passed into another, the whole life at Pentlands would come to be more and more her affair. There was no one to take the place of the old man . . . no one, save herself.
"What shall we do?" he asked in the same low voice. "I don't know. I am nearly at the end of things."
"We could bury them together," said Olivia softly. "We could have a double funeral."
He looked at her in astonishment. "You wouldn't mind that?" and when she shook her head in answer, he replied: "But we can't do it. There seems to me something wrong in such an idea. . . . I can't explain what I mean. . . . It oughtn't to be done. . . . A boy like Jack and an old reprobate like Horace."
They would have settled it quietly between them as they had settled so many troubles in the last years when John Pentland had come to her for strength, but at that moment the door opened suddenly and, without knocking, Aunt Cassie ​appeared, her eyes really blazing with an angry, hysterical light, her hair all hanging in little iron-gray wisps about her narrow face.
"What is it?" she asked. "What has gone wrong? I know there's something, and you've no right to keep it from me." She was shrill and brittle, as if in those two days all the pleasure and activity surrounding death had driven her into an orgy of excitement. At the sound of her voice, both Olivia and John Pentland started abruptly. She had touched them on nerves raw and worn.
The thin, high-pitched voice went on. "I've given up all my time to arranging things. I've barely slept. I sacrifice myself to you all day and night and I've a right to know." It was as if she had sensed the slow breaking up of the old man and sought now to hurl him aside, to depose him as head of the family, in one great coup d'état, setting herself up there in his place, a thin, fiercely intolerant tyrant; as if at last she had given up her old subtle way of trying to gain her ends by intrigue through the men of the family. She stood ready now to set up a matriarchy, the last refuge of a family whose strength was gone. She had risen thus in the same way once before within the memory of Olivia, in those long months when Mr. Struthers, fading slowly into death, yielded her the victory.
John Pentland sighed, profoundly, wearily, and murmured, "It's nothing, Cassie. It would only trouble you. Olivia and I are settling it."
But she did not retreat. Standing there, she held her ground and continued the tirade, working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. "I won't be put aside. No one ever tells me anything. For years now I've been shut out as if I were half-witted. Frail as I am, I work myself to the bone for the family and don't even get a word of thanks. . . . Why is Olivia always preferred to your own sister?" And ​tears of luxurious, sensual, self-pity began to stream down her withered face. She began even to mumble and mix her words, and she abandoned herself completely to the fleshly pleasure of hysterics.
Olivia, watching her quietly, saw that this was no usual occasion. This was, in truth, the new Aunt Cassie whom Sabine had revealed to her a few days before . . . the aggressively virginal Aunt Cassie who had been born in that moment on the terrace to take the place of the old Aunt Cassie who had existed always in an aura of tears and good works and sympathy. She understood now what she had never understood before—that Aunt Cassie was not merely an irrational hypochondriac, a harmless, pitiful creature, but a ruthless and unscrupulous force. She knew that behind this emotional debauch there lay some deeply conceived plan. Vaguely she suspected that the plan was aimed at subduing herself, or bringing her (Olivia) completely under the will of the old woman. It was the insect again beating its wings frantically against the windows of a world which she could never enter. . . .
And softly Olivia said, "Surely, Aunt Cassie, there is no need to make a scene . . . there's no need to be vulgar . . . at a time like this."
The old woman, suddenly speechless, looked at her brother, but from him there came no sign of aid or succor; she must have seen, plainly, that he had placed himself on the side of Olivia . . . the outsider, who had dared to accuse a Pentland of being vulgar.
"You heard what she said, John. . . . You heard what she said! She called your sister vulgar!" But her hysterical mood began to abate suddenly, as if she saw that she had chosen, after all, the wrong plan of attack. Olivia did not answer her. She only sat there, looking pale and patient and beautiful in her black clothes, waiting. It was a moment ​unfair to Aunt Cassie. No man, even Anson, would have placed himself against Olivia just then.
"If you must know, Cassie . . ." the old man said slowly. "It's a thing you won't want to hear. But if you must know, it is simply that Horace Pentland's body is at the station in Durham."
Olivia had a quick sense of the whited sepulcher beginning to crack, to fall slowly into bits.
At first Aunt Cassie only stared at them, snuffling and wiping her red eyes, and then she said, in an amazingly calm voice, "You see. . . . You never tell me anything. I never knew he was dead." There was a touch of triumph and vindication in her manner.
"There was no need of telling you, Cassie," said the old man. "You wouldn't let his name be spoken in the family for years. It was you—you and Anson—who made me threaten him into living abroad. Why should you care when he died?"
Aunt Cassie showed signs of breaking down once more. "You see, I'm always blamed for everything. I was thinking of the family all these years. We couldn't have Horace running around loose in Boston." She broke off with a sudden, fastidious gesture of disgust, as if she were washing her hands of the whole affair. "I could have managed it better myself. He ought never to have been brought home . . . to stir it all up again."
Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt Cassie. "He wanted to be buried here. . . . He wrote to ask me, when he was dying."
"He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his behavior. I say it again and I'll keep on saying it. He ought never to have been brought back here . . . after people even forgot whether he was alive or dead."
The perilous calm had settled over Olivia. . . . She had ​been looking out of the window across the marshes into the distance, and when she turned she spoke with a terrible quietness. She said: "You may do with Horace Pentland's body what you like. It is more your affair than mine, for I never saw him in my life. But it is my son who is dead . . . my son, who belongs to me more than to any of you. You may bury Horace Pentland on the same day . . . at the same service, even in the same grave. Things like that can't matter very much after death. You can't go on pretending forever. . . . Death is too strong for that. It's stronger than any of us puny creatures because it's the one truth we can't avoid. It's got nothing to do with prejudices and pride and respectability. In a hundred years—even in a year, in a month, what will it matter what we've done with Horace Pentland's body?"
She rose, still enveloped in the perilous calm, and said: "I'll leave Horace Pentland to you two. There is none of his blood in my veins. Whatever you do, I shall not object . . . only I wouldn't be too shabby in dealing with death."
She went out, leaving Aunt Cassie exhausted and breathless and confused. The old woman had won her battle about the burial of Horace Pentland, yet she had suffered a great defeat. She must have seen that she had really lost everything, for Olivia somehow had gone to the root of things, in the presence of John Pentland, who was himself so near to death. (Olivia daring to say proudly, as if she actually scorned the Pentland name, "There is none of his blood in my veins.")
But it was a defeat which Olivia knew she would never admit: that was one of the qualities which made it impossible to deal with Aunt Cassie. Perhaps, even as she sat there dabbing at her eyes, she was choosing new weapons for a struggle which had come at last into the open because it was impossible any longer to do battle through so weak and shifting an ally as Anson.
She was a natural martyr, Aunt Cassie. Martyrdom was ​the great feminine weapon of her Victorian day and she was practised in it; she had learned all its subtleties in the years she had lain wrapped in a shawl on a sofa subduing the full-blooded Mr. Struthers.
And Olivia knew as she left the room that in the future she would have to deal with a poor, abused, invalid aunt who gave all her strength in doing good works and received in return only cruelty and heartlessness from an outsider, from an intruder, a kind of adventuress who had wormed her way into the heart of the Pentland family. Aunt Cassie, by a kind of art of which she possessed the secret, would somehow make it all seem so.
The heat did not go away. It hung in a quivering cloud over the whole countryside, enveloping the black procession which moved through the lanes into the highroad and thence through the clusters of ugly stucco bungalows inhabited by the mill-workers, on its way past the deserted meeting-house where Preserved Pentland had once harangued a tough and sturdy congregation and the Rev. Josiah Milford had set out with his flock for the Western Reserve. . . . It enveloped the black, slow-moving procession to the very doors of the cool, ivy-covered stone church (built like a stage piece to imitate some English county church) where the Pentlands worshiped the more polite, compromising gods scorned and berated by the witch-burner. On the way, beneath the elms of High Street, Polish women and children stopped to stare and cross themselves at the sight of the grand procession.
The little church seemed peaceful after the heat and the stir of the Durham street, peaceful and hushed and crowded to the doors by the relatives and connections of the family. Even the back pews were filled by the poor half-forgotten ​remnants of the family who had no wealth to carry them smoothly along the stream of life. Old Mrs. Featherstone (who did washing) was there sobbing because she sobbed at all funerals, and old Miss Haddon, the genteel Pentland cousin, dressed even in the midst of summer in her inevitable cape of thick black broadcloth, and Mrs. Malson, shabby-genteel in her foulards and high-pitched bonnet, and Miss Murgatroyd whose bullfinch house was now "Ye Witch's Broome" where one got bad tea and melancholy sandwiches. . . .
Together Bishop Smallwood and Aunt Cassie had planned a service calculated skilfully to harrow the feelings and give full scope to the vast emotional capacities of their generation and background.
They chose the most emotional of hymns, and Bishop Smallwood, renowned for his effect upon pious and sentimental old ladies, said a few insincere and pompous words which threw Aunt Cassie and poor old Mrs. Featherstone into fresh excesses of grief. The services for the boy became a barbaric rite dedicated not to his brief and pathetic existence but to a glorification of the name he bore and of all those traits—the narrowness, the snobbery, the lower middle-class respect for property—which had culminated in the lingering tragedy of his sickly life. In their respective pews Anson and Aunt Cassie swelled with pride at the mention of the Pentland ancestry. Even the sight of the vigorous, practical, stocky Polish women staring round-eyed at the funeral procession a little before, returned to them now in a wave of pride and secret elation. The same emotion in some way filtered back through the little church from the pulpit where Bishop Smallwood (with the sob in his voice which had won him prizes at the seminary) stood surrounded by midsummer flowers, through all the relatives and connections, until far in the back among the more obscure and remote ones it became simply a pride in their relation to New England and the ancient dying village that ​was fast disappearing beneath the inroads of a more vigorous world. Something of the Pentland enchantment engulfed them all, even old Mrs. Featherstone, with her poor back bent from washing to support the four defective grandchildren who ought never to have been born. Through her facile tears (she wept because it was the only pleasure left her) there shone the light of a pride in belonging to these people who had persecuted witches and evolved transcendentalism and Mr. Lowell and Doctor Holmes and the good, kind Mr. Longfellow. It raised her somehow above the level of those hardy foreigners who worshiped the Scarlet Woman of Rome and jostled her on the sidewalks of High Street.
In all the little church there were only two or three, perhaps, who escaped that sudden mystical surge of self-satisfaction. . . . O'Hara, who was forever outside the caste, and Olivia and old John Pentland, sitting there side by side so filled with sorrow that they did not even resent the antics of Bishop Smallwood. Sabine (who had come, after all, to the services) sensed the intensity of the engulfing emotion. It filled her with a sense of slow, cold, impotent rage.
As the little procession left the church, wiping its eyes and murmuring in lugubrious tones, the clouds which a little earlier had sprung up against the distant horizon began to darken the whole sky. The air became so still that the leaves on the tall, drooping elms hung as motionless as leaves in a painted picture, and far away, gently at first, and then with a slow, increasing menace, rose the sound of distant echoing thunder. Ill at ease, the mourners gathered in little groups about the steps, regarding alternately the threatening sky and the waiting hearse, and presently, one by one, the more timorous ones began to drift sheepishly away. Others followed them slowly until by the time the coffin was borne out, they had all melted away save for the members of the "immediate family" and one or two others. Sabine remained, and O'Hara and old ​Mrs. Soames (leaning on John Pentland's arm as if it were her grandson who was dead), and old Miss Haddon in her black cape, and the pall-bearers, and of course Bishop Smallwood and the country rector who, in the presence of this august and saintly pillar of the church, had faded to insignificance. Besides these there were one or two other relatives, like Struthers Pentland, a fussy little bald man (cousin of John Pentland and of the disgraceful Horace), who had never married but devoted himself instead to fathering the boys of his classes at Harvard.
It was this little group which entered the motors and hurried off after the hearse in its shameless race with the oncoming storm.
The town burial-ground lay at the top of a high, bald hill where the first settlers of Durham had chosen to dispose of their dead, and the ancient roadway that led up to it was far too steep and stony to permit the passing of motors, so that part way up the hill the party was forced to descend and make the remainder of the journey on foot. As they assembled, silently but in haste, about the open, waiting grave, the sound of the thunder accompanied now by wild flashes of lightning, drew nearer and nearer, and the leaves of the stunted trees and shrubs which a moment before had been so still, began to dance and shake madly in the green light that preceded the storm.
Bishop Smallwood, by nature a timorous man, stood beside the grave opening his jewel-encrusted Prayer Book (he was very High Church and fond of incense and precious stones) and fingering the pages nervously, now looking down at them, now regarding the stolid Polish grave-diggers who stood about waiting to bury the last of the Pentlands. There were irritating small delays, but at last everything was ready and the ​Bishop, reading as hastily as he dared, began the service in a voice less rich and theatrical than usual.
"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. . . ."
And what followed was lost in a violent crash of thunder so that the Bishop was able to omit a line or two without being discovered. The few trees on the bald hill began to sway and rock, bending low toward the earth, and the crape veils of the women performed wild black writhings. In the uproar of wind and thunder only a sentence or two of the service became audible. . . .
"For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that the past is as a watch in the night. . . ."
And then again a wild, angry Nature took possession of the services, drowning out the anxious voice of the Bishop and the loud theatrical sobs of Aunt Cassie, and again there was a sudden breathless hush and the sound of the Bishop's voice, so pitiful and insignificant in the midst of the storm, reading. . . .
"O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."
And again:
"For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God in His Providence to take out of the world the soul of our deceased brother."
And at last, with relief, the feeble, reedlike voice, repeating with less monotony than usual: "The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen."
Sabine, in whose hard nature there lay some hidden thing which exulted in storms, barely heard the service. She stood there watching the wild beauty of the sky and the distant sea and the marshes and thinking how different a thing the burial of the first Pentland must have been from the timorous, ​hurried rite that marked the passing of the last. She kept seeing those first fanatical, hard-faced, rugged Puritans standing above their tombs like ghosts watching ironically the genteel figure of the Apostle to the Genteel and his jeweled Prayer Book. . . .
The Polish grave-diggers set about their work stolidly indifferent to the storm, and before the first motor had started down the steep and stony path, the rain came with a wild, insane violence, sweeping inward in a wall across the sea and the black marshes. Sabine, at the door of her motor, raised her head and breathed deeply, as if the savage, destructive force of the storm filled her with a kind of ecstasy.
On the following day, cool after the storm and bright and clear, a second procession made its way up the stony path to the top of the bald hill, only this time Bishop Smallwood was not there, nor Cousin Struthers Pentland, for they had both been called away suddenly and mysteriously. And Anson Pentland was not there because he would have nothing to do with a blackguard like Horace Pentland, even in death. In the little group about the open grave stood Olivia and John Pentland and Aunt Cassie, who had come because, after all, the dead man's name was Pentland, and Miss Haddon, (in her heavy broadcloth cape), who never missed any funeral and had learned about this one from her friend, the undertaker, who kept her perpetually au courant. There were not even any friends to carry the coffin to the grave, and so this labor was divided between the undertaker's men and the grave-diggers. . . .
And the service began again, read this time by the rector, ​who since the departure of the Bishop seemed to have grown a foot in stature. . . .
"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. . . .
"For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is past as a watch in the night. . . .
"O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."
Aunt Cassie wept again, though the performance was less good than on the day before, but Olivia and John Pentland stood in silence while Horace Pentland was buried at last in the midst of that little colony of grim and respectable dead.
Sabine was there, too, standing at a little distance, as if she had a contempt for all funerals. She had known Horace Pentland in life and she had gone to see him in his long exile whenever her wanderings led her to the south of France, less from affection than because it irritated the others in the family. (He must have been happier in that warm, rich country than he could ever have been in this cold, stony land.) But she had come to-day less for sentimental reasons than because it gave her the opportunity of a triumph over Aunt Cassie. She could watch Aunt Cassie out of her cold green eyes while they all stood about to bury the family skeleton. Sabine, who had not been to a funeral in the twenty-five years since her father's death, had climbed the stony hill to the Durham town burial-ground twice in as many days. . . .
The rector was speaking again. . . .
"The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen."
The peace which had taken possession of Olivia as she sat alone by the side of her dead son, returned to her slowly with the passing of the excitement over the funeral. Indeed, she was for once thankful for the listless, futile enchantment which invested the quiet old world. It soothed her at a moment when, all interest having departed from life, she wanted merely to be left in peace. She came to see for a certainty that there was no tragedy in her son's death; the only tragedy had been that he had ever lived at all such a baffled, painful, hopeless existence. And now, after so many years of anxiety, there was peace and a relaxation that seemed strange and in a way delicious . . . moments when, lying in the chaise longue by the window overlooking the marshes, she was enveloped by deep and healing solitude. Even the visits of Aunt Cassie, who would have forced her way into Olivia's room in the interests of "duty," made only a vague, dreamlike impression. The old lady became more and more a droning, busy insect, the sound of whose buzzing grew daily more distant and vague, like the sound of a fly against a window-pane heard through veils of sleep.
From her window she sometimes had a distant view of the old man, riding alone now, in the trap across the fields behind the old white horse, and sometimes she caught a glimpse of his lean figure riding the savage red mare along the lanes. He no longer went alone with the mare; he had yielded to Higgins' insistent warnings of her bad temper and permitted the groom to go with him, always at his side or a little behind to guard him, riding a polo pony with an ease and grace which made horse and man seem a single creature . . . a kind of centaur. On a horse the ugliness ​of the robust, animal little man seemed to flow away. It was as if he had been born thus, on a horse, and was awkward and ill at ease with his feet on the earth.
And Olivia knew the thought that was always in the mind of her father-in-law as he rode across the stony, barren fields. He was thinking all the while that all this land, all this fortune, even Aunt Cassie's carefully tended pile, would one day belong to a family of some other name, perhaps a name which he had never even heard.
There were no more Pentlands. Sybil and her husband would be rich, enormously so, with the Pentland money and Olivia's money . . . but there would never be any more Pentlands. It had all come to an end in this . . . futility and oblivion. In another hundred years the name would exist, if it existed at all, only as a memory, embalmed within the pages of Anson's book.
The new melancholy which settled over the house came in the end even to touch the spirit of Sybil, so young and so eager for experience, like a noxious mildew. Olivia noticed it first in a certain shadowy listlessness that seemed to touch every action of the girl, and then in an occasional faint sigh of weariness, and in the visits the girl paid her in her room, and in the way she gave up willingly evenings at Brook Cottage to stay at home with her mother. She saw that Sybil, who had always been so eager, was touched by the sense of futility which she (Olivia) had battled for so long. And Sybil, Sybil of them all, alone possessed the chance of being saved.
She thought, "I must not come to lean on her. I must not be the sort of mother who spoils the life of her child."
And when John Pentland came to sit listlessly by her side, sometimes in silence, sometimes making empty speeches that meant nothing in an effort to cover his despair, she saw that he, too, had come to her for the strength which she alone ​could give him. Even old Mrs. Soames had failed him, for she lay ill again and able to see him only for a few minutes each day. (It was Sabine's opinion, uttered during one of her morning visits, that these strange sudden illnesses came from overdoses of drugs.)
So she came to see that she was being a coward to abandon the struggle now, and she rose one morning almost at dawn to put on her riding-clothes and set out with Sybil across the wet meadows to meet O'Hara. She returned with something of her pallor gone and a manner almost of gaiety, her spirit heightened by the air, the contact with O'Hara and the sense of having taken up the struggle once more.
Sabine, always watchful, noticed the difference and put it down to the presence of O'Hara alone, and in this she was not far wrong, for set down there in Durham, he affected Olivia powerfully as one who had no past but only a future. With him she could talk of things which lay ahead—of his plans for the farm he had bought, of Sybil's future, of his own reckless, irresistible career.
O'Hara himself had come to a dangerous state of mind. He was one of those men who seek fame and success less for the actual rewards than for the satisfaction of the struggle, the fierce pleasure of winning with all the chances against one. He had won successes already. He had his house, his horses, his motor, his well-tailored clothes, and he knew the value of these things, not only in the world of Durham, but in the slums and along the wharves of Boston. He had no illusions about the imperfect workings of democracy. He knew (perhaps because, having begun at the very bottom, he had fought his way very near to the top) that the poor man expects a politician to be something of a splendorous affair, especially when he has begun his career as a very ​common and ordinary sort of poor man. O'Hara was not playing his game foolishly or recklessly. When he visited the slums or sat in at political meetings, he was a sort of universal common man, a brother to all. When he addressed a large meeting or presided at an assembly, he arrived in a glittering motor and appeared in the elegant clothes suitable to a representative of the government, of power; and so he reflected credit on those men who had played with him as boys along India Wharf and satisfied the universal hunger in man for something more splendorous than the machinery of a perfect democracy.
He understood the game perfectly and made no mistakes, for he had had the best of all training—that of knowing all sorts of people in all sorts of conditions. In himself, he embodied them all, if the simple and wholly kindly and honest were omitted; for he was really not a simple man nor a wholly honest one and he was too ruthless to be kindly. He understood people (as Sabine had guessed), with their little prides and vanities and failings and ambitions.
Aunt Cassie and Anson in the rigidity of their minds had been unjust in thinking that their world was the goal of his ambitions. They had, in the way of those who depend on their environment as a justification for their own existence, placed upon it a value out of all proportion in the case of a man like O'Hara. To them it was everything, the ultimate to be sought on this earth, and so they supposed it must seem to O'Hara. It would have been impossible for them to believe that he considered it only as a small part of his large scheme of life and laid siege to it principally for the pleasure that he found in the battle; for it was true that O'Hara, once he had won, would not know what to do with the fruits of his victory.
Already he himself had begun to see this. He had begun to understand that the victory was so easy that the battle ​held little savor for him. Moments of satisfaction such as that which had overtaken him as he sat talking to Sabine were growing more and more rare . . . moments when he would stop and think, "Here am I, Michael O'Hara, a nobody . . . son of a laborer and a housemaid, settled in the midst of such a world as Durham, talking to such a woman as Mrs. Cane Callendar."
No, the savor was beginning to fail, to go out of the struggle. He was beginning to be bored, and as he grew bored he grew also restless and unhappy.
Born in the Roman Catholic church, he was really neither a very religious nor a very superstitious man. He was skeptic enough not to believe all the faiths the church sought to impose upon him, yet he was not skeptic enough to find peace of mind in an artificial will to believe. For so long a time he had relied wholly upon himself that the idea of leaning for support, even in lonely, restless moments, upon a God or a church, never even occurred to him. He remained outwardly a Roman Catholic because by denying the faith he would have incurred the enmity of the church and many thousands of devout Irish and Italians. The problem simply did not concern him deeply one way or the other.
And so he had come, guided for the moment by no very strong passion, into the doldrums of confusion and boredom. Even his fellow-politicians in Boston saw the change in him and complained that he displayed no very great interest in the campaign to send him to Congress. He behaved at times as if it made not the slightest difference to him whether he was elected to Congress or not . . . he, this Michael O'Hara who was so valuable to his party, so engaging and shrewd, who could win for it almost anything he chose.
And though he took care that no one should divine it, this strange state of mind troubled him more deeply than any of his friends. He was assailed by the certainty that there ​was something lacking from his life, something very close to the foundations. Now that he was inactive and bored, he had begun to think of himself for the first time. The fine, glorious burst of first youth, when everything seemed part of a splendid game, was over and done now, and he felt himself slipping away toward the borderland of middle-age. Because he was a man of energy and passion, who loved life, he felt the change with a keen sense of sadness. There was a kind of horror for him in the idea of a lowered tempo of life—a fear that filled him at times with a passionately satisfactory sort of Gaelic melancholy.
In such moments, he had quite honestly taken stock of all he possessed, and found the amassed result bitterly unsatisfactory. He had a good enough record. He was decidedly more honorable than most men in such a dirty business as politics—indeed, far more honorable and freer from spites and nastinesses than many of those who had come out of this very sacred Durham world. He had made enough money in the course of his career, and he was winning his battle in Durham. Yet at thirty-five life had begun to slacken, to lose some of that zest which once had led him to rise every morning bursting with animal spirits, his brain all a-glitter with fascinating schemes.
And then, in the very midst of this perilous state of mind, he discovered one morning that the old sensation of delight at rising had returned to him, only it was not because his brain was filled with fascinating schemes. He arose with an interest in life because he knew that in a little while he would see Olivia Pentland. He arose, eager to fling himself on his horse and, riding across the meadows, to wait by the abandoned gravel-pit until he saw her coming over the dew-covered fields, radiant, it seemed to him, as the morning itself. On the days when she did not come it was as if the bottom had dropped out of his whole existence.
​It was not that he was a man encountering the idea of woman for the first time. There had been women in his life always, since the very first bedraggled Italian girl he had met as a boy among the piles of lumber along the wharves. There had been women always because it was impossible for a man so vigorous and full of zest, so ruthless and so scornful, to have lived thirty-five years without them, and because he was an attractive man, filled when he chose to be, with guile and charm, whom women found it difficult to resist. There had been plenty of women, kept always in the background, treated as a necessity and prevented skilfully from interfering with the more important business of making a career.
But with Olivia Pentland, something new and disturbing had happened to him . . . something which, in his eagerness to encompass all life and experience, possessed an overwhelming sensuous fascination. She was not simply another woman in a procession of considerable length. Olivia Pentland, he found, was different from any of the others . . . a woman of maturity, poised, beautiful, charming and intelligent, and besides all these things she possessed for him a kind of fresh and iridescent bloom, the same freshness, only a little saddened, that touched her young daughter.
In the beginning, when they had talked together while she planned the garden at Brook Cottage, he had found himself watching her, lost in a kind of wonder, so that he scarcely understood what she was saying. And all the while he kept thinking, "Here is a wonderful woman . . . the most wonderful I've ever seen or will ever see again . . . a woman who could make life a different affair for me, who would make of love something which people say it is."
She had affected him thus in a way that swept aside all the vulgar and cynical coarseness with which a man of such experience is likely to invest the whole idea of woman. Un​til now women had seemed to him made to entertain men or to provide children for them, and now he saw that there was, after all, something in this sentiment with which people surrounded a love affair. For a long time he searched for a word to describe Olivia and in the end he fell back upon the old well-worn one which she always brought to mind. She was a "lady"—and as such she had an overwhelming effect upon his imagination.
He had said to himself that here was a woman who could understand him, not in the aloof, analytical fashion of a clever woman like Sabine Callendar, but in quite another way. She was a woman to whom he could say, "I am thus and so. My life has been of this kind. My motives are of this sort," and she would understand, the bad with the good. She would be the one person in the world to whom he could pour out the whole burden of secrets, the one woman who could ever destroy the weary sense of loneliness which sometimes afflicted him. She made him feel that, for all his shrewdness and hard-headed scheming, she was far wiser than he would ever be, that in a way he was a small boy who might come to her and, burying his head in her lap, have her stroke his thick black hair. She would understand that there were times when a man wanted to be treated thus. In her quiet way she was a strong woman, unselfish, too, who did not feed upon flattery and perpetual attention, the sort of woman who is precious to a man bent upon a career. The thought of her filled him with a poignant feeling of sadness, but in his less romantic moments he saw, too, that she held the power of catching him up out of his growing boredom. She would be of great value to him.
And so Sabine had not been far wrong when she thought of him as the small boy sitting on the curbstone who had looked up at her gravely and said, "I'm playing." He was at times very like such an image.
​But in the end he was always brought up abruptly against the hard reality of the fact that she was already married to a man who did not want her himself but who would never set her free, a man who perhaps would have sacrificed everything in the world to save a scandal in his family. And beyond these hard, tangible difficulties he discerned, too, the whole dark decaying web, less obvious but none the less potent, in which she had become enmeshed.
Yet these obstacles only created a fascination to a mind so complex, so perverse, for in the solitude of his mind and in the bitterness of the long struggle he had known, he came to hold the whole world in contempt and saw no reason why he should not take what he wanted from this Durham world. Obstacles such as these provided the material for a new battle, a new source of interest in the turbulent stream of his existence; only this time there was a difference . . . that he coveted the prize itself more than the struggle. He wanted Olivia Pentland, strangely enough, not for a moment or even for a month or a year, but for always.
He waited because he understood, in the shrewdness of his long experience, that to be insistent would only startle such a woman and cause him to lose her entirely, and because he knew of no plan of action which could overcome the obstacles which kept them apart. He waited, as he had done many times in his career, for circumstances to solve themselves. And while he waited, with each time that he saw her she grew more and more desirable, and his own invincible sense of caution became weaker and weaker.
In those long days spent in her room, Olivia had come slowly to be aware of the presence of the newcomer at Brook Cottage. It had begun on the night of Jack's death with ​the sound of his music drifting across the marshes, and after the funeral Sabine had talked of him to Olivia with an enthusiasm curiously foreign to her. Once or twice she had caught a glimpse of him crossing the meadows toward O'Hara's shining chimneys or going down the road that led through the marshes to the sea—a tall, red-haired young man who walked with a slight limp. Sybil, she found, was strangely silent about him, but when she questioned the girl about her plans for the day she found, more often than not, that they had to do with him. When she spoke of him, Sybil had a way of blushing and saying, "He's very nice, Mother. I'll bring him over when you want to see people. . . . I used to know him in Paris."
And Olivia, wisely, did not press her questions. Besides, Sabine had told her almost all there was to know . . . perhaps more than Sybil herself knew.
Sabine said, "He belongs to a rather remarkable family . . . wilful, reckless and full of spirit. His mother is probably the most remarkable of them all. She's a charming woman who has lived luxuriously in Paris most of her life . . . not one of the American colony. She doesn't ape any one and she's incapable of pretense of any sort. She's lived, rather alone, over there on money . . . quite a lot of money . . . which seems to come out of steel-mills in some dirty town of the Middle West. She's one of my great friends . . . a woman of no intellect, but very beautiful and blessed with a devastating charm. She is one of the women who was born for men. . . . She's irresistible to them, and I imagine there have been men in her life always. She was made for men, but her taste is perfect, so her morals don't matter."
The woman . . . indeed all Jean de Cyon's family . . . seemed to fascinate Sabine as she sat having tea with Olivia, for she went on and on, talking far more than usual, de​scribing the house of Jean's mother, her friends, the people whom one met at her dinners, all there was to tell about her.
"She's the sort of woman who has existed since the beginning of time. There's some mystery about her early life. It has something to do with Jean's father. I don't think she was happy with him. He's never mentioned. Of course, she's married again now to a Frenchman . . . much older than herself . . . a man, very distinguished, who has been in three cabinets. That's where the boy gets his French name. The old man has adopted him and treats him like his own son. De Cyon is a good name in France, one of the best; but of course Jean hasn't any French blood. He's pure American, but he's never seen his own country until now."
Sabine finished her tea and putting her cup back on the Regence table (which had come from Olivia's mother and so found its graceful way into a house filled with stiff early American things), she added, "It's a remarkable family . . . wild and restless. Jean had an aunt who died in the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, and his cousin is Lilli Barr . . . a really great musician." She looked out of the window and after a moment said in a low voice, "Lilli Barr is the woman whom my husband married . . . but she divorced him, too, and now we are friends . . . she and I." The familiar hard, metallic laugh returned and she added, "I imagine our experience with him made us sympathetic. . . . You see, I know the family very well. It's the sort of blood which produces people with a genius for life . . . for living in the moment."
She did not say that Jean and his mother and the ruthless cousin Lilli Barr fascinated her because they stood in a way for the freedom toward which she had been struggling through all the years since she escaped from Durham. They were free in a way from countries, from towns, from laws, from prejudices, even in a way from nationality. She had ​hoped once that Jean might interest himself in her own sullen, independent, clever Thérèse, but in her knowledge of the world she had long ago abandoned that hope, knowing that a boy so violent and romantic, so influenced by an upbringing among Frenchmen, a youth so completely masculine, was certain to seek a girl more soft and gentle and feminine than Thérèse. She knew it was inevitable that he should fall in love with a girl like Sybil, and in a way she was content because it fell in admirably with her own indolent plans. The Pentlands were certain to look upon Jean de Cyon as a sort of gipsy, and when they knew the whole truth. . . .
The speculation fascinated her. The summer in Durham, even with the shadow of Jack's death flung across it, was not proving as dreadful as she had feared; and this new development interested her as something she had never before observed . . . an idyllic love affair between two young people who each seemed to her a perfect, charming creature.
It had all begun on the day nearly a year earlier when all Paris was celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil had gone with Thérèse and Sabine to lay a wreath beside the flame at the Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment). And afterward she played in the garden with the dogs which they would not let her keep at the school in Saint-Cloud, and then she had gone into the house to find there a fascinating and beautiful woman of perhaps fifty—a Madame de Cyon, who had come to lunch, with her son, a young man of twenty-four, tall, straight and slender, with red hair and dark blue eyes and a deep, pleasant voice. On account of the day he was dressed in his cuirassier's uniform of black and silver, and ​because of an old wound he walked with a slight limp. Almost at once (she remembered this when she thought of him) he had looked at her in a frank, admiring way which gave her a sense of pleasurable excitement wholly new in her experience.
Something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the Marseillaise and the Sambre et Meuse, the sight of the soldiers in the street and the great Arc with the flame burning there . . . something in the feel of Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of her. It was something which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.
She knew vaguely that she must have fallen in love in the moment she stood there in Sabine Callendar's salon bowing to Lily de Cyon. The experience had grown in intensity when, after lunch, she took him into the garden to show him her dogs and watched him rubbing the ears of the Doberman "Imp" and talking to the dog softly in a way which made her know that he felt about animals as she did. He had been so pleasant in his manner, so gentle in his bigness, so easy to talk to, as if they had always been friends.
And then almost at once he had gone away to the Argentine, without even seeing her again, on a trip to learn the business of cattle-raising because he had the idea that one day he might settle himself as a rancher. But he left behind him a vivid image which with the passing of time grew more and more intense in the depths of a romantic nature which revolted at the idea of Thérèse choosing a father scientifically for her child. It was an image by which she had come, almost unconsciously, to measure other men, even to such small details as the set of their shoulders and the way they used their hands and the timbre of their voices. It was this she ​had really meant when she said to her mother, "I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly." She had meant, quite without knowing it, that it must be a man like Jean de Cyon . . . charming, romantic and a little wild.
She had not forgotten him, though there were moments at the school in Saint-Cloud when she had believed she would never see him again—moments when she was swept by a delicious sense of hopeless melancholy in which she believed that her whole life had been blighted, and which led her to make long and romantic entries in the diary that was kept hidden beneath her mattress. And so as she grew more hopeless, the aura of romance surrounding him took on colors deeper and more varied and intense. She had grown so pale that Mademoiselle Vernueil took to dosing her, and Thérèse accused her abruptly of having fallen in love, a thing she denied vaguely and with overtones of romantic mystery.
And then with the return to Pentlands (a return advised by her mother on account of Jack's health) the image dimmed a little in the belief that even by the wildest flights of imagination there was no chance of her seeing him again. It became a hopeless passion; she prepared herself to forget him and, in the wisdom of her young mind, grow accustomed to the idea of marrying one of the tame young men who were so much more suitable and whom her family had always known. She had watched her admirers carefully, weighing them always against the image of the young man with red hair, dressed in the black and silver of the cuirassiers, and beside that image they had seemed to her—even the blond, good-looking Mannering boy—like little boys, rather naughty and not half so old and wise as herself. She had reconciled herself secretly and with gravity to the idea of making one of the matches common in her world—a marriage determined by property and the fact that her fiancé would be "the right sort of person."
​And so the whole affair had come to take on the color of a tragic romance, to be guarded secretly. Perhaps when she was an old woman she would tell the story to her grandchildren. She believed that whomever she married, she would be thinking always of Jean de Cyon. It was one of those half-comic illusions of youth in which there is more than a grain of melancholy truth.
And then abruptly had come the news of his visit to Brook Cottage. She still kept her secret, but not well enough to prevent her mother and Sabine from suspecting it. She had betrayed herself first on the very night of Jack's death when she had said, with a sudden light in her eye, "It's Jean de Cyon. . . . I'd forgotten he was arriving to-night." Olivia had noticed the light because it was something which went on and on.
And at Brook Cottage young de Cyon, upset by the delay caused by the funeral and the necessity of respecting the mourning at Pentlands, had sulked and behaved in such a way that he would have been a nuisance to any one save Sabine, who found amusement in the spectacle. Used to rushing headlong toward anything he desired (as he had rushed into the French army at seventeen and off to the Argentine nine months ago), he turned ill-tempered and spent his days out of doors, rowing on the river and bathing in the solitude of the great white beach. He quarreled with Thérèse, whom he had known since she was a little girl, and tried to be as civil as possible toward the amused Sabine.
She knew by now that he had not come to Durham through any great interest in herself or Thérèse. She knew now how wise she had been (for the purposes of her plan) to have included in her invitation to him the line . . . "Sybil ​Pentland lives on the next farm to us. You may remember her. She lunched with us last Armistice Day."
She saw that he rather fancied himself as a man of the world who was being very clever in keeping his secret. He asked her about Sybil Pentland in a casual way that was transparently artificial, and consulted her on the lapse of time decently necessary before he broke in upon the mourning at Pentlands, and had Miss Pentland shown any admiration for the young men about Durham? If he had not been so charming and impatient he would have bored Sabine to death.
The young man was afraid of only one thing . . . that perhaps she had changed in some way, that perhaps she was not in the reality as charming as she had seemed to him in the long months of his absence. He was not without experience (indeed, Sabine believed that he had gone to the Argentine to escape from some Parisian complication) and he knew that such calamitous disappointments could happen. Perhaps when he came to know her better the glamour would fade. Perhaps she did not remember him at all. But she seemed to him, after months of romantic brooding, the most desirable woman he had ever seen.
It was a new world in which he discovered himself, in some way a newer and more different world than the vast grass-covered plains from which he had just come. People about Durham, he learned, had a way of saying that Boston and Durham were like England, but this he put down quietly as a kind of snobbery, because Boston and Durham weren't like England at all, so far as he could see; in spots Boston and Durham seemed old, but there wasn't the same richness, the same glamour about them. They should have been romantic and yet they were not; they were more, it seemed to him, like the illustrations in a school history. They were ​dry . . . sec, he thought, considering the French word better in this case on account of its sound.
And it wasn't the likeness to England that he found interesting, but rather the difference . . . the bleak rawness of the countryside and the sight of whole colonies of peoples as strange and foreign as the Czechs and Poles providing a sort of alien background to the whole picture.
He had gone about the business of becoming acquainted with his own country in a thorough, energetic fashion, and being a sensuous youth, filled with a taste for colors and sounds and all the emanations of the spectacle of life, he was acutely conscious of it.
To Sabine, he said, "You know the funny thing is that it seems to me like coming home. It makes me feel that I belong in America . . . not in Durham, but in New York or some of those big roaring towns I've passed through."
He spoke, naturally enough, not at all like an American but in the clipped English fashion, rather swallowing his words, and now and then with a faint trace of French intonation. His voice was deeper and richer than the New England voices, with their way of calling Charles Street "Challs Street" and sacred Harvard . . . "Havaad."
It was the spectacle of New York which had fascinated him more than any other because it surpassed all his dreams of it and all the descriptions people had given him of its immense force and barbaric splendor and the incredible variety of tongues and people. New York, Sabine told him with a consciousness of uttering treason, was America, far more than the sort of life he would encounter in Durham.
As he talked to Sabine of New York, he would rise to that pitch of excitement and enthusiasm which comes to people keenly alive. He even confided in her that he had left Europe never to return there to live.
"It's old country," he said, "and if one has been brought ​up there, as I've been, there's no reason for going back there to live. In a way it's a dead world . . . dead surely in comparison to the Americas. And it's the future that interests me . . . not the past. I want to be where the most is going on . . . in the center of things."
When he was not playing the piano wildly, or talking to Sabine, or fussing about with Thérèse among the frogs and insects of the laboratory she had rigged up on the glass-enclosed piazza, he was walking about the garden in a state of suppressed excitement, turning over and over in his young mind his own problem and the plans he had for adjusting himself in this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of twenty-five, was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled with a reckless sense of adventure . . . young men irresistible in such an old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.
To ease his impatience he sought refuge in a furious physical activity, rowing, swimming and driving with Sabine about the Durham countryside. He could not walk far, on account of the trouble caused by his old wound, but he got as far as O'Hara's house, where he met the Irishman and they became friends. O'Hara turned over to him a canoe and a rowing-scull and told him that whenever his leg was better he might have a horse from his stables.
One morning as he pulled his canoe up the muddy bank of the river after his early exercise, he heard the sound of hoofs in the thick mud near at hand and, turning, he saw Sybil Pentland on her mare Andromache coming out of the thicket almost at his side.
It was a superb morning—cool for Durham in mid-​August—and on the lazy river the nympheas spread their waxy white blossoms in starlike clusters against a carpet of green pads. It was a morning made for delights, with the long rays of the rising sun striking to silver the dew-hung spider-webs that bound together the tangled masses of wild-grape vines; and young de Cyon, standing on the edge of the path, flushed with health and the early morning exercise, his thick red hair all rumpled, was overcome swiftly by a sense of tremendous physical well-being and strength. A whole world lay before him waiting to be conquered; and into it, out of the tangled thicket, had come Sybil Pentland, more charming in the flesh than she had seemed to him even on the long starlit nights when he lay awake on the pampas thinking of her.
For a second neither of them said anything. The girl, startled and blushing a little, but touched, too, by a quiet sense of dignity, drew in her mare; and Jean, looking up at her, said in a falsely casual way (for his veins were throbbing with excitement), "Oh! Hello! You're Miss Pentland."
"Yes." But she looked suddenly disappointed, as if she really believed that he had almost forgotten her.
Standing clad only in trousers and a rowing-shirt, he looked down at his costume and said, grinning, "I'm not dressed to receive visitors."
Somehow this served to break the sense of restraint, and they fell into conversation, exchanging a few banal remarks on the beauty of the morning, and Jean, standing by Andromache, rubbing her nose with the same tenderness he had shown toward Sybil's dogs, looked at her out of the candid blue eyes and said, "I should have come to see you sooner, only I thought you mightn't want to see me."
A quivering note of warmth colored his voice.
"It would have made no difference," she said. "And now ​you must come often . . . as often as you like. How long are you staying at Brook Cottage?"
For a second he hesitated. "A fortnight . . . perhaps. Perhaps . . . longer."
And looking down at him, she thought, "I must make him stay. If I lose him again now. . . . I must make him stay. I like him more than any one in the world. I can't lose him now."
And she began to reason with herself that Fate was on her side, that destiny had delivered him again into her hands. It was like a thing ordained, and life with him would be exciting, a thrilling affair. The quiet stubbornness, come down to her from Olivia, began to rise and take possession of her. She was determined not to lose him.
They moved away up the river, still talking in a rather stiff fashion, while Jean walked beside Andromache, limping a little. One banality followed another as they groped toward each other, each proud and fearful of showing his feelings, each timid and yet eager and impatient. It was the excitement of being near to each other that made the conversation itself take on a sense of importance. Neither of them really knew what they were saying. In one sense they seemed strange and exciting to each other, but in another they were not strange at all because there lay between them that old feeling, which Sybil had recognized in the garden of the Rue de Tilsitt, that they had known each other always. There were no hesitations or doubts or suspicions.
Each time that Olivia rose at dawn to ride out with Sybil and meet O'Hara at the old gravel-pit, the simple excursion became more glamorous to her. There was a youth in the contact with Sybil and the Irishman which she had almost forgotten, a feeling of strength for which she had long been hungering. It was, she found, a splendid way to begin the day—in the cool of the morning, riding away over the drenched grass; it made a freshening contrast to the rest of a day occupied largely by such old people as her father-in-law and Anson (who was really an old man) and the old woman in the north wing and by the persistent fluttering attacks of Aunt Cassie. And Olivia, who was not without a secret vanity, began to notice herself in the mirror . . . that her eyes were brighter and her skin was more clear. She saw that she was even perhaps beautiful, and that the riding-habit became her in a romantic fashion.
She knew, too, riding across the fields between Sybil and O'Hara, that he sometimes watched her with a curious bright light in his blue eyes. He said nothing; he betrayed in no way the feeling behind all that sudden, quiet declaration on the terrace of Brook Cottage. She began to see that he was (as Sabine had discovered almost at once) a very clever and dangerous man. It was not alone because of the strange, almost physical, effect he had upon people—an effect which was almost as if his presence took possession of you completely—but because he had patience and knew how to be silent. If he had rushed in, recklessly and clumsily, everything would have been precipitated and ruined at once. There would have been a scene ending with his dismissal and Olivia, perhaps, would have been free; but he had never touched her. It was simply that he was always there, assuring her in ​some mysterious way that his emotions had not changed, that he still wanted her more than anything in all the world. And to a woman who was romantic by nature and had never known any romance, it was a dangerous method.
There came a morning when, waiting by the gravel-pit, O'Hara saw that there was only one rider coming toward him across the fields from Pentlands. At first it occurred to him that it must be Sybil coming alone, without her mother, and the old boredom and despair engulfed him swiftly. It was only when the rider came nearer and he saw the white star in the forehead of her horse that he knew it was Olivia herself. That she came alone, knowing what he had already told her, he took as a sign of immense importance.
This time he did not wait or ride slowly toward her. He galloped impatiently as a boy across the wet fields to meet her.
She had the old look of radiance about her and a shyness, too, that made her seem at first a trifle cool and withdrawn. She told him quietly, "Sybil didn't come this morning. She went out very early to fish with Jean de Cyon. The mackerel are beginning to run in the open water off the marshes."
There was an odd, strained silence and O'Hara said, "He's a nice boy . . . de Cyon." And then, with a heroic effort to overcome the shyness which she always managed to impose upon him, he said in a low voice, "But I'm glad she didn't come. I've wanted it to be like this all along."
She did not say archly that he must not talk in this vein. It was a part of her fascination that she was too honest and intelligent not to dispense with such coquetry. He had had enough of coquetry from cheap women and had wearied of it long ago. Besides, she had wanted it "like this" herself and she knew that with O'Hara it was silly to pretend, because sooner or later he always found her out. They were not ​children, either of them. They both knew what they were doing, that it was a dangerous, even a reckless thing; and yet the very sense of excitement made the adventure as irresistible to the one as to the other.
For a little time they rode in silence, watching the dark hoofs of the horses as they sent up little showers of glittering dew from the knee-deep grass and clover, and presently as they turned out of the fields into the path that led into the birch woods, he laughed and said, "A penny for your thoughts."
Smiling, she replied, "I wouldn't sell them for millions."
"They must be very precious."
"Perhaps . . . precious to me, and to no one else."
"Not to any one at all. . . ."
"No. . . . I don't think they'd interest any one. They're not too cheerful."
At this he fell silent again, with an air of brooding and disappointment. For a time she watched him, and presently she said, "You mustn't sulk on a morning like this."
"I'm not sulking. . . . I was only . . . thinking."
She laughed. "A penny for your thoughts."
He did not laugh. He spoke with a sudden intensity. "They, too, are worth a million . . . more than that . . . only I'll share them with you. I wouldn't share them with any one else."
At the sound of his voice, a silly wave of happiness swept through Olivia. She thought, "I'm being young and ridiculous and enjoying myself."
Aloud she said, "I haven't a penny, but if you'll trust me until to-morrow?"
And then he turned to her abruptly, the shyness gone and in its place an emotion close to irritation and anger. "Why buy them?" he asked. "You know well enough what they ​are. You haven't forgotten what I told you on the terrace at Brook Cottage. . . . It's grown more true every day . . . all of it." When he saw that she had become suddenly grave, he said, "And what about you?"
"You know how impossible it is."
"Nothing is impossible . . . nothing. Besides, I don't mean the difficulties. Those will come later. . . . I only mean your own feelings."
"Can't you see that I like you? . . . I must like you else I wouldn't have come alone this morning."
"Like me," he echoed with bitterness. "I'm not interested in having you like me!" And when she made no reply, he added, almost savagely, "Why do you keep me away from you? Why do you always put a little wall about yourself?"
"Do I?" she asked, stupidly, and with a sense of pain.
"You are cool and remote even when you laugh."
"I don't want to be—I hate cold people."
For a moment she caught a quick flash of the sudden bad temper which sometimes betrayed him. "It's because you're so damned ladylike. Sometimes I wish you were a servant or a scrub-woman."
"And then I wouldn't be the same—would I?"
He looked up quickly, as if to make a sudden retort, and then, checking himself, rode on in silence. Stealing a glance at him, Olivia caught against the wall of green a swift image of the dark, stubborn tanned head—almost, she thought, like the head of a handsome bull—bent a little, thoughtfully, almost sadly; and again a faint, weak feeling attacked her—the same sensation that had overcome her on the night of her son's death when she sat regarding the back of Anson's head and not seeing it at all. She thought, "Why is it that this man—a stranger—seems nearer to me than Anson has ever been? Why is it that I talk to him in a way I never talked to Anson?" And a curious feeling of pity seized ​her at the sight of the dark head. In a quick flash of understanding she saw him as a little boy searching awkwardly for something which he did not understand; she wanted to stroke the thick, dark hair in a comforting fashion.
He was talking again. "You know nothing about me," he was saying. "And sometimes I think you ought to know it all." Looking at her quickly he asked, "Could you bear to hear it . . . a little of it?"
She smiled at him, certain that in some mysterious, clairvoyant fashion she had penetrated the very heart of his mood, and she thought, "How sentimental I'm being . . . how sickeningly sentimental!" Yet it was a rich, luxuriant mood in which her whole being relaxed and bathed itself. She thought again, "Why should I not enjoy this? I've been cautious all my life."
And seeing her smile, he began to talk, telling her, as they rode toward the rising sun, the story of his humble origin and of those early bitter days along India Wharf, and from time to time she said, "I understand. My own childhood wasn't happy," or, "Go on, please. It fascinates me . . . more than you can imagine."
So he went on, telling her the story of the long scar on his temple, telling her as he had known he would, of his climb to success, confessing everything, even the things of which he had come to be a little ashamed, and betraying from time to time the bitterness which afflicts those who have made their own way against great odds. The shrewd, complex man became as naïve as a little boy; and she understood, as he had known she would. It was miraculous how right he had been about her.
Lost in this mood, they rode on and on as the day rose and grew warm, enveloped all the while in the odor of the dark, rich, growing thicket and the acrid smell of the tall marsh-ferns, until Olivia, glancing at her watch, said, "It is very ​late. I shall have missed the family breakfast." She meant really that Anson would have gone up to Boston by now and that she was glad—only it was impossible to say a thing like that.
At the gravel-pit, she bade him good-by, and turning her mare toward Pentlands she felt the curious effect of his nearness slipping away from her with each new step; it was as if the hot August morning were turning cold. And when she came in sight of the big red brick house sitting so solidly among the ancient elms, she thought, "I must never do this again. I have been foolish." And again, "Why should I not do it? Why should I not be happy? They have no right to any claim upon me."
But there was one claim, she knew; there was Sybil. She must not make a fool of herself for the sake of Sybil. She must do nothing to interfere with what had been taking place this very morning in the small fishing-boat far out beyond the marshes somewhere near the spot where Savina Pentland had been drowned. She knew well enough why Sybil had chosen to go fishing instead of riding; it was so easy to look at the girl and at young de Cyon and know what was happening there. She herself had no right to stand in the way of this other thing which was so much younger and fresher, so much more nearly perfect.
As she put her mare over the low wall by the stables she looked up and chanced to see a familiar figure in rusty black standing in the garden, as if she had been there all the while looking out over the meadows, watching them. As she drew near, Aunt Cassie came forward with an expression of anxiety on her face, saying in a thin, hushed voice, as if she might be overheard, "I thought you'd never come back, Olivia dear. I've been looking everywhere for you."
​Aware from the intense air of mystery that some new calamity had occurred, Olivia replied, "I was riding with O'Hara. We went too far and it was too hot to hurry the horses."
"I know," said Aunt Cassie. "I saw you." ("Of course she would," thought Olivia. "Does anything ever escape her?") "It's about her. She's been violent again this morning and Miss Egan says you may be able to do something. She keeps raving about something to do with the attic and Sabine."
"Yes, I know what it is. I'll go right up."
Higgins appeared, grinning and with a bright birdlike look in his sharp eyes, as if he knew all that had been happening and wanted to say, "Ah, you were out with O'Hara this morning . . . alone. . . . Well, you can't do better, Ma'am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man like that."
As he took the bridle, he said, "That's a fine animal Mr. O'Hara rides, Ma'am. I wish we had him in our stables. . . ."
She murmured something in reply and without even waiting for coffee hastened up the dark stairs to the north wing. On the way past the row of tall deep-set windows she caught a swift glimpse of Sabine, superbly dressed and holding a bright yellow parasol over her head, moving indolently up the long drive toward the house, and again she had a sudden unaccountable sense of something melancholy, perhaps even tragic, a little way off. It was one of those quick, inexplicable waves of depression that sweeps over one like a shadow. She said to herself, "I'm depressed now because an hour ago I was too happy."
And immediately she thought, "But it was like Aunt Cassie to have such a thought as that. I must take care or I'll be ​getting to be a true Pentland . . . believing that if I'm happy a calamity is soon to follow."
She had moments of late when it seemed to her that something in the air, some power hidden in the old house itself, was changing her slowly, imperceptibly, in spite of herself.
Miss Egan met her outside the door, with the fixed eternal smile which to-day seemed to Olivia the sort of smile that the countenance of Fate itself might wear.
"The old lady is more quiet," she said. "Higgins helped me and we managed to bind her in the bed so that she couldn't harm herself. It's surprising how much strength she has in her poor thin body." She explained that old Mrs. Pentland kept screaming, "Sabine! Sabine!" for Mrs. Callendar and that she kept insisting on being allowed to go into the attic.
"It's the old idea that she's lost something up there," said Miss Egan. "But it's probably only something she's imagined." Olivia was silent for a moment. "I'll go and search," she said. "It might be there is something and if I could find it, it would put an end to these spells."
She found them easily, almost at once, now that there was daylight streaming in at the windows of the cavernous attic. They lay stuffed away beneath one of the great beams . . . a small bundle of ancient yellowed letters which had been once tied together with a bit of mauve ribbon since torn in haste by some one who thrust them in this place of concealment. They had been opened carelessly and in haste, for the moldering paper was all cracked and torn along the edges. The ink, violet once, had turned to a dirty shade of brown.
Standing among the scattered toys left by Jack and Sybil ​the last time they had played house, Olivia held the letters one by one up to the light. There were eleven in all and each one was addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, at Pentlands. Eight of them had been sent through the Boston post-office and the other three bore no stamps of any kind, as if they had been sent by messengers or in a bouquet or between the leaves of a book. The handwriting was that of a man, large, impetuous, sprawling, which showed a tendency to blur the letters together in a headlong, impatient way.
She thought at once, "They are addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, which means Mrs. Jared Pentland. Anson will be delighted, for these must be the letters which passed between Savina Pentland and her cousin, Toby Cane. Anson needed them to complete the book."
And then it occurred to her that there was something strange about the letters—in their having been hidden and perhaps found by the old lady belowstairs and then hidden away a second time. Old Mrs. Pentland must have found them there nearly forty years ago, when they still allowed her to wander about the house. Perhaps it had been on one of those rainy days when Anson and Sabine had come into the attic to play in this very corner with these same old toys—the days when Sabine refused to pretend that muddy water was claret. And now the old lady was remembering the discovery after all these years because the return of Sabine and the sound of her name had lighted some train of long-forgotten memories.
Seating herself on a broken, battered old trunk, she opened the first of the letters reverently so as not to dislodge the bits of violet sealing-wax that still clung to the edges, and almost at once she read with a swift sense of shock:
Carissima,
I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when ​you didn't come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you. . . .
She stopped reading. She understood it now. . . . The scamp Toby Cane had been more than merely a cousin to Savina Pentland; he had been her lover and that was why she had hidden the letters away beneath the beams of the vast unfinished attic, intending perhaps to destroy them one day. And then she had been drowned before there was time and the letters lay in their hiding-place until John Pentland's wife had discovered them one day by chance, only to hide them again, forgetting in the poor shocked mazes of her mind what they were or where they were hidden. They were the letters which Anson had been searching for.
But she saw at once that Anson would never use the letters in his book, for he would never bring into the open a scandal in the Pentland family, even though it was a scandal which had come to an end, tragically, nearly a century earlier and was now almost pure romance. She saw, of course, that a love affair between so radiant a creature as Savina Pentland and a scamp like Toby Cane would seem rather odd in a book called "The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony." Perhaps it was better not to speak of the letters at all. Anson would manage somehow to destroy all the value there was in them; he would sacrifice truth to the gods of Respectability and Pretense.
Thrusting the letters into her pocket, she descended the dark stairway, and in the north wing Miss Egan met her to ask, almost with an air of impatience, "I suppose you didn't find anything?"
"No," said Olivia quickly, "nothing which could possibly have interested her."
"It's some queer idea she's hatched up," replied Miss Egan, ​and looked at Olivia as if she doubted the truth of what she had said.
She did not go downstairs at once. Instead, she went to her own room and after bathing, seated herself in the chaise longue by the open window above the terrace, prepared to read the letters one by one. From below there arose a murmur of voices, one metallic and hard, the other nervous, thin, and high-pitched—Sabine's and Aunt Cassie's—as they sat on the terrace in acid conversation, each trying to outstay the other. Listening, Olivia decided that she was a little weary of them both this morning; it was the first time it had ever occurred to her that in a strange way there was a likeness between two women who seemed so different. That curious pair, who hated each other so heartily, had the same way of trying to pry into her life.
None of the letters bore any dates, so she fell to reading them in the order in which they had been found, beginning with the one which read:
Carissima,
I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you didn't come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you. . . .
She read on:
It's the thought of his being there beside you, even taking possession of you sometimes, that I can't bear. I see him sitting there in the drawing-room, looking at you—eating you with his eyes and pretending all the while that he is above the lusts of the flesh. The flesh! The flesh! You and I, ​dearest, know the glories of the flesh. Sometimes I think I'm a coward not to kill him at once.
For God's sake, get rid of him somehow to-night. I can't pass another evening alone in the dark gloomy cottage waiting in vain. It is more than I can bear to sit there knowing that every minute, every second, may bring the sound of your step. Be merciful to me. Get rid of him somehow.
I have not touched a drop of anything since I last saw you. Are you satisfied with that?
I am sending this in a book by black Hannah. She will wait for an answer.
Slowly, as she read on and on through the mazes of the impetuous, passionate writing, the voices from the terrace below, the one raised now and a little angry, the other still metallic, hard and indifferent, grew more and more distant until presently she did not hear them at all and in the place of the sound her senses received another impression—that of a curious physical glow, stealing slowly through her whole body. It was as if there lay in that faded brown writing a smoldering fire that had never wholly died out and would never be extinguished until the letters themselves had been burned into ashes.
Word by word, line by line, page by page, the whole tragic, passionate legend came to recreate itself, until near the end she was able to see the three principal actors in it with the reality of life, as if they had never died at all but had gone on living in this old house, perhaps in this very room where she sat . . . the very room which once must have belonged to Savina Pentland.
She saw the husband, that Jared Pentland of whom no portrait existed because he would never spend money on such a luxury, as he must have been in life—a sly man, shrewd and pious and avaricious save when the strange dark passion for ​his wife made of him an unbalanced creature. And Savina Pentland herself was there, as she looked out of the Ingres portrait—dark, voluptuous, reckless, with her bad enticing eyes—a woman who might easily be the ruin of a man like Jared Pentland. And somehow she was able to get a clear and vivid picture of the writer of those smoldering letters—a handsome scamp of a lover, dark like his cousin Savina, and given to drinking and gambling. But most of all she was aware of that direct, unashamed and burning passion that never had its roots in this stony New England soil beyond the windows of Pentlands. A man who frankly glorified the flesh! A waster! A seducer! And yet a man capable of this magnificent fire which leaped up from the yellow pages and warmed her through and through. It occurred to her then for the first time that there was something heroic and noble and beautiful in a passion so intense. For a moment she was even seized by the feeling that reading these letters was a kind of desecration.
They revealed, too, how Jared Pentland had looked upon his beautiful wife as a fine piece of property, an investment which gave him a sensual satisfaction and also glorified his house and dinner-table. (What Sabine called the "lower middle-class sense of property.") He must have loved her and hated her at once, in the way Higgins loved and hated the handsome red mare. He must have been proud of her and yet hated her because she possessed so completely the power of making a fool of him. The whole story moved against a background of family . . . the Pentland family. There were constant references to cousins and uncles and aunts and their suspicions and interference.
"It must have begun," thought Olivia, "even in those days."
Out of the letters she learned that the passion had begun in Rome when Savina Pentland was sitting for her portrait ​by Ingres. Toby Cane had been there with her and afterwards she had gone with him to his lodgings; and when they had returned to the house at Durham (almost new then and the biggest country seat in all New England) they had met in the cottage—Brook Cottage, which still stood there within sight of Olivia's window—Brook Cottage, which after the drowning had been bought by Sabine's grandfather and then fallen into ruins and been restored again by the too-bright, vulgar, resplendent touch of O'Hara. It was an immensely complicated and intricate story which went back, back into the past and seemed to touch them all here in Durham.
"The roots of life at Pentlands," thought Olivia, "go down, down into the past. There are no new branches, no young, vigorous shoots."
She came at length to the last of the letters, which had buried in its midst the terrible revealing lines—
If you knew what delight it gives me to have you write that the child is ours beyond any doubt, that there cannot be the slightest doubt of it! The baby belongs to us . . . to us alone! It has nothing to do with him. I could not bear the idea of his thinking that the child is his if it was not that it makes your position secure. The thought tortures me but I am able to bear it because it leaves you safe and above suspicion.
Slowly, thoughtfully, as if unable to believe her eyes, she reread the lines through again, and then placed her hands against her head with a gesture of feeling suddenly weak and out of her mind.
She tried to think clearly. "Savina Pentland never had but one child, so far as I know . . . never but one. And that must have been Toby Cane's child."
There could be no doubt. It was all there, in writing. ​The child was the child of Toby Cane and a woman who was born Savina Dalgedo. He was not a Pentland and none of his descendants had been Pentlands . . . not one.
They were not Pentlands at all save as the descendants of Savina and her lover had married among the Brahmins where Pentland blood was in every family. They were not Pentlands by blood and yet they were Pentlands beyond any question, in conduct, in point of view, in tradition. It occurred to Olivia for the first time how immense and terrible a thing was that environment, that air which held them all enchanted . . . all the cloud of prejudices and traditions and prides and small anxieties. It was a world so set, so powerful, so iron-bound that it had made Pentlands of people like Anson and Aunt Cassia, even like her father-in-law. It made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at all. She saw it now as an overwhelming, terrifying power that was a part of the old house. It stood rooted in the very soil of all the landscape that spread itself beyond her windows.
And in the midst of this realization she had a swift impulse to laugh, hysterically, for the picture of Anson had come to her suddenly . . . Anson pouring his whole soul into that immense glorification to be known as "The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony."
Slowly, as the first shock melted away a little, she began to believe that the yellowed bits of paper were a sort of infernal machine, an instrument with the power of shattering a whole world. What was she to do with this thing—this curious symbol of a power that always won every struggle in one way or another, directly as in the case of Savina and her lover, or by taking its vengeance upon body or soul as it had done in the case of Aunt Cassie's poor, prying, scheming mind? And there was, too, the dark story of Horace Pentland, and the madness of the old woman in the north wing, and even those sudden terrible bouts of drinking which made ​so fine a man as John Pentland into something very near to a beast.
It was as if a light of blinding clarity had been turned upon all the long procession of ancestors. She saw now that if "The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony" was to have any value at all as truth it must be rewritten in the light of the struggle between the forces glorified by that drunken scamp Toby Cane and this other terrible force which seemed to be all about her everywhere, pressing even herself slowly into its own mold. It was an old struggle between those who chose to find their pleasure in this world and those who looked for the vague promise of a glorified future existence.
She could see Anson writing in his book, "In the present generation (192-) there exists Cassandra Pentland Struthers (Mrs. Edward Cane Struthers), a widow who has distinguished herself by her devotion to the Episcopal Church and to charity and good works. She resides in winter in Boston and in summer at her country house near Durham on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first Pentland, distinguished founder of the American family."
Yes, Anson would write just those words in his book. He would describe thus the old woman who sat belowstairs hoping all the while that Olivia would descend bearing the news of some new tragedy . . . that virginal old woman who had ruined the whole life of her husband and kept poor half-witted Miss Peavey a prisoner for nearly thirty years.
The murmur of voices died away presently and Olivia, looking out of the window, saw that it was Aunt Cassie who had won this time. She was standing in the garden looking down the drive with that malignant expression which sometimes appeared on her face in moments when she thought ​herself alone. Far down the shadow-speckled drive, the figure of Sabine moved indolently away in the direction of Brook Cottage. Sabine, too, belonged in a way to the family; she had grown up enveloped in the powerful tradition which made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at all. Perhaps (thought Olivia) the key to Sabine's restless, unhappy existence also lay in the same dark struggle. Perhaps if one could penetrate deeply enough in the long family history one would find there the reasons for Sabine's hatred of this Durham world and the reasons why she had returned to a people she disliked with all the bitter, almost fanatic passion of her nature. There was in Sabine an element of cold cruelty.
At the sight of Olivia coming down the steps into the garden, Aunt Cassie turned and moved forward quickly with a look of expectancy, asking, "And how is the poor thing?"
And at Olivia's answer, "She's quiet now . . . sleeping. It's all passed," the looked changed to one of disappointment.
She said, with an abysmal sigh, "Ah, she will go on forever. She'll be alive long after I've gone to join dear Mr. Struthers."
"Invalids are like that," replied Olivia, by way of saying something. "They take such care of themselves." And almost at once, she thought, "Here I am playing the family game, pretending that she's not mad but only an invalid."
She had no feeling of resentment against the busy old woman; indeed it seemed to her at times that she had almost an affection for Aunt Cassie—the sort of affection one has for an animal or a bit of furniture which has been about almost as long as one can remember. And at the moment the figure of Aunt Cassie, the distant sight of Sabine, the bright garden full of flowers . . . all these things seemed to her melodramatic and unreal, for she was still living in ​the Pentlands of Savina and Toby Cane. It was impossible to fix her attention on Aunt Cassie and her flutterings.
The old lady was saying, "You all seem to have grown very fond of this man O'Hara."
(What was she driving at now?) Aloud, Olivia said, "Why not? He's agreeable, intelligent . . . even distinguished in his way."
"Yes," said Aunt Cassie. "I've been discussing him with Sabine, and I've come to the conclusion that I may have been wrong about him. She thinks him a clever man with a great future." There was a pause and she added with an air of making a casual observation, "But what about his past? I mean where does he come from."
"I know all about it. He's been telling me. That's why I was late this morning."
For a time Aunt Cassie was silent, as if weighing some deep problem. At last she said, "I was wondering about seeing too much of him. He has a bad reputation with women. . . . At least, so I'm told."
Olivia laughed. "After all, Aunt Cassie, I'm a grown woman. I can look out for myself."
"Yes. . . . I know." She turned with a disarming smile of Christian sweetness. "I don't want you to think that I'm interfering, Olivia. It's the last thing I'd think of doing. But I was considering your own good. It's harmless enough, I'm sure. No one would ever think otherwise, knowing you, my dear. But it's what people will say. There was a scandal I believe about eight years ago . . . a road-house scandal!" She said this with an air of great suffering, as if the words "road-house scandal" seared her lips.
"I suppose so. Most men . . . politicians, I mean . . . have scandals connected with their names. It's part of the business, Aunt Cassie."
And she kept thinking with amazement of the industry of ​the old lady—that she should have taken the trouble of going far back into O'Hara's past to find some definite thing against him. She did not doubt the ultimate truth of Aunt Cassie's insinuation. Aunt Cassie did not lie deliberately; there was always a grain of truth in her implications, though sometimes the poor grain lay buried so deeply beneath exaggerations that it was almost impossible to discover it. And a thing like that might easily be true about O'Hara. With a man like him you couldn't expect women to play the rôle they played with a man like Anson.
"It's only on account of what people will say," repeated Aunt Cassie.
"I've almost come to the conclusion that what people say doesn't really matter any longer. . . ."
Aunt Cassie began suddenly to pick a bouquet from the border beside her. "Oh, it's not you I'm worrying about, Olivia dear. But we have to consider others sometimes. . . . There's Sybil and Anson, and even the very name of Pentland. There's never been any such suspicion attached to it . . . ever."
It was incredible (thought Olivia) that any one would make such a statement, incredible anywhere else in the world. She wanted to ask, "What about your brother and old Mrs. Soames?" And in view of those letters that lay locked in her dressing-table. . . .
At that moment lunch was announced by Peters' appearance in the doorway. Olivia turned to Aunt Cassie, "You're staying, of course."
"No, I must go. You weren't expecting me."
So Olivia began the ancient game, played for so many years, of pressing Aunt Cassie to stay to lunch.
"It makes no difference," she said, "only another plate." And so on through a whole list of arguments that she had memorized long ago. And at last Aunt Cassie, with the air ​of having been pressed beyond her endurance, yielded, and to Peters, who had also played the game for years, Olivia said, "Lay another place for Mrs. Struthers."
She had meant to stay all along. Lunching out saved both money and trouble, for Miss Peavey ate no more than a bird, at least not openly; and, besides, there were things she must find out at Pentlands, and other things which she must plan. In truth, wild horses could not have dragged her away.
As they entered the house, Aunt Cassie, carrying the bouquet she had plucked, said casually, "I met the Mannering boy on the road this morning and told him to come in to-night. I thought you wouldn't mind. He's very fond of Sybil, you know."
"No, of course not," replied Olivia. "I don't mind. But I'm afraid Sybil isn't very interested in him."