“Dear Mrs. Pentland,You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more.Michael O’Hara.”
“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 AuntCassie 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 thecalamity 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 Cassieappeared, 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 greatcoup 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?” Andtears 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 momentunfair 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 hadbeen 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 ismyson who is dead ...myson, who belongs tomemore 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 wasthe 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.
Theheat 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-forgottenremnants 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 thatwas 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 oldMrs. 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 theBishop, 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 perpetuallyau courant. There were not even any friends to carry the coffin to the grave, and so this labor was divided between the undertaker’s men and the grave-diggers....
And the service began again, read this time by the rector,who since the departure of the Bishop seemed to have grown a foot in stature....
“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord....
“For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is past as a watch in the night....
“O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
Aunt Cassie wept again, though the performance was less good than on the day before, but Olivia and John Pentland stood in silence while Horace Pentland was buried at last in the midst of that little colony of grim and respectable dead.
Sabine was there, too, standing at a little distance, as if she had a contempt for all funerals. She had known Horace Pentland in life and she had gone to see him in his long exile whenever her wanderings led her to the south of France, less from affection than because it irritated the others in the family. (He must have been happier in that warm, rich country than he could ever have been in this cold, stony land.) But she had come to-day less for sentimental reasons than because it gave her the opportunity of a triumph over Aunt Cassie. She could watch Aunt Cassie out of her cold green eyes while they all stood about to bury the family skeleton. Sabine, who had not been to a funeral in the twenty-five years since her father’s death, had climbed the stony hill to the Durham town burial-ground twice in as many days....
The rector was speaking again....
“The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen.”
The little group turned away in silence, and in silence disappeared over the rim of the hill down the steep path. The secret burial was finished and Horace Pentland was left alone with the Polish grave-diggers, come home at last.
Thepeace 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 manseem 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 alonecould 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 verycommon 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 battleheld 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 therewas something lacking from his life, something very close to the foundations. Now that he was inactive and bored, he had begun to think of himself for the first time. The fine, glorious burst of first youth, when everything seemed part of a splendid game, was over and done now, and he felt himself slipping away toward the borderland of middle-age. Because he was a man of energy and passion, who loved life, he felt the change with a keen sense of sadness. There was a kind of horror for him in the idea of a lowered tempo of life—a fear that filled him at times with a passionately satisfactory sort of Gaelic melancholy.
In such moments, he had quite honestly taken stock of all he possessed, and found the amassed result bitterly unsatisfactory. He had a good enough record. He was decidedly more honorable than most men in such a dirty business as politics—indeed, far more honorable and freer from spites and nastinesses than many of those who had come out of this very sacred Durham world. He had made enough money in the course of his career, and he was winning his battle in Durham. Yet at thirty-five life had begun to slacken, to lose some of that zest which once had led him to rise every morning bursting with animal spirits, his brain all a-glitter with fascinating schemes.
And then, in the very midst of this perilous state of mind, he discovered one morning that the old sensation of delight at rising had returned to him, only it was not because his brain was filled with fascinating schemes. He arose with an interest in life because he knew that in a little while he would see Olivia Pentland. He arose, eager to fling himself on his horse and, riding across the meadows, to wait by the abandoned gravel-pit until he saw her coming over the dew-covered fields, radiant, it seemed to him, as the morning itself. On the days when she did not come it was as if the bottom had dropped out of his whole existence.
It was not that he was a man encountering the idea of woman for the first time. There had been women in his life always, since the very first bedraggled Italian girl he had met as a boy among the piles of lumber along the wharves. There had been women always because it was impossible for a man so vigorous and full of zest, so ruthless and so scornful, to have lived thirty-five years without them, and because he was an attractive man, filled when he chose to be, with guile and charm, whom women found it difficult to resist. There had been plenty of women, kept always in the background, treated as a necessity and prevented skilfully from interfering with the more important business of making a career.
But with Olivia Pentland, something new and disturbing had happened to him ... something which, in his eagerness to encompass all life and experience, possessed an overwhelming sensuous fascination. She was not simply another woman in a procession of considerable length. Olivia Pentland, he found, was different from any of the others ... a woman of maturity, poised, beautiful, charming and intelligent, and besides all these things she possessed for him a kind of fresh and iridescent bloom, the same freshness, only a little saddened, that touched her young daughter.
In the beginning, when they had talked together while she planned the garden at Brook Cottage, he had found himself watching her, lost in a kind of wonder, so that he scarcely understood what she was saying. And all the while he kept thinking, “Here is a wonderful woman ... the most wonderful I’ve ever seen or will ever see again ... a woman who could make life a different affair for me, who would make of love something which people say it is.”
She had affected him thus in a way that swept aside all the vulgar and cynical coarseness with which a man of such experience is likely to invest the whole idea of woman. Until now women had seemed to him made to entertain men or to provide children for them, and now he saw that there was, after all, something in this sentiment with which people surrounded a love affair. For a long time he searched for a word to describe Olivia and in the end he fell back upon the old well-worn one which she always brought to mind. She was a “lady”—and as such she had an overwhelming effect upon his imagination.
He had said to himself that here was a woman who could understand him, not in the aloof, analytical fashion of a clever woman like Sabine Callendar, but in quite another way. She was a woman to whom he could say, “I am thus and so. My life has been of this kind. My motives are of this sort,” and she would understand, the bad with the good. She would be the one person in the world to whom he could pour out the whole burden of secrets, the one woman who could ever destroy the weary sense of loneliness which sometimes afflicted him. She made him feel that, for all his shrewdness and hard-headed scheming, she was far wiser than he would ever be, that in a way he was a small boy who might come to her and, burying his head in her lap, have her stroke his thick black hair. She would understand that there were times when a man wanted to be treated thus. In her quiet way she was a strong woman, unselfish, too, who did not feed upon flattery and perpetual attention, the sort of woman who is precious to a man bent upon a career. The thought of her filled him with a poignant feeling of sadness, but in his less romantic moments he saw, too, that she held the power of catching him up out of his growing boredom. She would be of great value to him.
And so Sabine had not been far wrong when she thought of him as the small boy sitting on the curbstone who had looked up at her gravely and said, “I’m playing.” He was at times very like such an image.
But in the end he was always brought up abruptly against the hard reality of the fact that she was already married to a man who did not want her himself but who would never set her free, a man who perhaps would have sacrificed everything in the world to save a scandal in his family. And beyond these hard, tangible difficulties he discerned, too, the whole dark decaying web, less obvious but none the less potent, in which she had become enmeshed.
Yet these obstacles only created a fascination to a mind so complex, so perverse, for in the solitude of his mind and in the bitterness of the long struggle he had known, he came to hold the whole world in contempt and saw no reason why he should not take what he wanted from this Durham world. Obstacles such as these provided the material for a new battle, a new source of interest in the turbulent stream of his existence; only this time there was a difference ... that he coveted the prize itself more than the struggle. He wanted Olivia Pentland, strangely enough, not for a moment or even for a month or a year, but for always.
He waited because he understood, in the shrewdness of his long experience, that to be insistent would only startle such a woman and cause him to lose her entirely, and because he knew of no plan of action which could overcome the obstacles which kept them apart. He waited, as he had done many times in his career, for circumstances to solve themselves. And while he waited, with each time that he saw her she grew more and more desirable, and his own invincible sense of caution became weaker and weaker.
Inthose 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 withthe sound of his music drifting across the marshes, and after the funeral Sabine had talked of him to Olivia with an enthusiasm curiously foreign to her. Once or twice she had caught a glimpse of him crossing the meadows toward O’Hara’s shining chimneys or going down the road that led through the marshes to the sea—a tall, red-haired young man who walked with a slight limp. Sybil, she found, was strangely silent about him, but when she questioned the girl about her plans for the day she found, more often than not, that they had to do with him. When she spoke of him, Sybil had a way of blushing and saying, “He’s very nice, Mother. I’ll bring him over when you want to see people.... I used to know him in Paris.”
And Olivia, wisely, did not press her questions. Besides, Sabine had told her almost all there was to know ... perhaps more than Sybil herself knew.
Sabine said, “He belongs to a rather remarkable family ... wilful, reckless and full of spirit. His mother is probably the most remarkable of them all. She’s a charming woman who has lived luxuriously in Paris most of her life ... not one of the American colony. She doesn’t ape any one and she’s incapable of pretense of any sort. She’s lived, rather alone, over there on money ... quite a lot of money ... which seems to come out of steel-mills in some dirty town of the Middle West. She’s one of my great friends ... a woman of no intellect, but very beautiful and blessed with a devastating charm. She is one of the women who was born for men.... She’s irresistible to them, and I imagine there have been men in her life always. She was made for men, but her taste is perfect, so her morals don’t matter.”
The woman ... indeed all Jean de Cyon’s family ... seemed to fascinate Sabine as she sat having tea with Olivia, for she went on and on, talking far more than usual, describing the house of Jean’s mother, her friends, the people whom one met at her dinners, all there was to tell about her.
“She’s the sort of woman who has existed since the beginning of time. There’s some mystery about her early life. It has something to do with Jean’s father. I don’t think she was happy with him. He’s never mentioned. Of course, she’s married again now to a Frenchman ... much older than herself ... a man, very distinguished, who has been in three cabinets. That’s where the boy gets his French name. The old man has adopted him and treats him like his own son. De Cyon is a good name in France, one of the best; but of course Jean hasn’t any French blood. He’s pure American, but he’s never seen his own country until now.”
Sabine finished her tea and putting her cup back on the Regence table (which had come from Olivia’s mother and so found its graceful way into a house filled with stiff early American things), she added, “It’s a remarkable family ... wild and restless. Jean had an aunt who died in the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, and his cousin is Lilli Barr ... a really great musician.” She looked out of the window and after a moment said in a low voice, “Lilli Barr is the woman whom my husband married ... but she divorced him, too, and now we are friends ... she and I.” The familiar hard, metallic laugh returned and she added, “I imagine our experience with him made us sympathetic.... You see, I know the family very well. It’s the sort of blood which produces people with a genius for life ... for living in the moment.”
She did not say that Jean and his mother and the ruthless cousin Lilli Barr fascinated her because they stood in a way for the freedom toward which she had been struggling through all the years since she escaped from Durham. They were free in a way from countries, from towns, from laws, from prejudices, even in a way from nationality. She hadhoped 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.
Ithad 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, andbecause 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 theMarseillaiseand theSambre 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 shehad 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) tohave 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 disappointmentscouldhappen. 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 tohim, 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,wasAmerica, 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 broughtup 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 shereallybelieved 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 nowyou must come often ... as often as you like. How long are you staying at Brook Cottage?”
For a second he hesitated. “A fortnight ... perhaps. Perhaps ... longer.”
And looking down at him, she thought, “I must make him stay. If I lose him again now.... I must make him stay. I like him more than any one in the world. I can’t lose him now.”
And she began to reason with herself that Fate was on her side, that destiny had delivered him again into her hands. It was like a thing ordained, and life with him would be exciting, a thrilling affair. The quiet stubbornness, come down to her from Olivia, began to rise and take possession of her. She was determined not to lose him.
They moved away up the river, still talking in a rather stiff fashion, while Jean walked beside Andromache, limping a little. One banality followed another as they groped toward each other, each proud and fearful of showing his feelings, each timid and yet eager and impatient. It was the excitement of being near to each other that made the conversation itself take on a sense of importance. Neither of them really knew what they were saying. In one sense they seemed strange and exciting to each other, but in another they were not strange at all because there lay between them that old feeling, which Sybil had recognized in the garden of the Rue de Tilsitt, that they had known each other always. There were no hesitations or doubts or suspicions.
The sky was brilliant; the scent of the mucky river and growing weeds was overwhelming. There came to both of them a quickening of the senses, a sort of heightened ecstasy, which shut out all the world. It was a kind of enchantment, but different from the enchantment which enveloped the dead house at Pentlands.
Eachtime 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 insome 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 notchildren, 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 theyare. 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 seizedher 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.”