Therewere times now when Aunt Cassie told herself that Olivia’s strange moods had vanished at last, leaving in their place the old docile, pleasant Olivia who had always had a way of smoothing out the troubles at Pentlands. The sudden perilous calm no longer settled over their conversations; Aunt Cassie was no longer fearful of “speaking her mind, frankly, for the good of all of them.” Olivia listened toher quietly, and it is true that she was happier in one sense because life at Pentlands seemed to be working itself out; but inwardly, she went her own silent way, grieving in solitude because she dared not add the burden of her grief to that of old John Pentland. Even Sabine, more subtle in such things than Aunt Cassie, came to feel herself quietly shut out from Olivia’s confidence.
Sybil, slipping from childhood into womanhood, no longer depended upon her; she even grew withdrawn and secret about Jean, putting her mother off with empty phrases where once she had confided everything. Behind the pleasant, quiet exterior, it seemed to Olivia at times that she had never been so completely, so superbly, alone. She began to see that at Pentlands life came to arrange itself into a series of cubicles, each occupied by a soul shut in from all the others. And she came, for the first time in her life, to spend much time thinking of herself.
With the beginning of autumn she would be forty years old ... on the verge of middle-age, a woman perhaps with a married daughter. Perhaps at forty-two she would be a grandmother (it seemed likely with such a pair as Sybil and young de Cyon) ... a grandmother at forty-two with her hair still thick and black, her eyes bright, her face unwrinkled ... a woman who at forty-two might pass for a woman ten years younger. A grandmother was a grandmother, no matter how youthful she appeared. As a grandmother she could not afford to make herself ridiculous.
She could perhaps persuade Sybil to wait a year or two and so put off the evil day, yet such an idea was even more abhorrent to her. The very panic which sometimes seized her at the thought of turning slowly into an old woman lay also at the root of her refusal to delay Sybil’s marriage. What was happening to Sybil had never happened to herself and never could happen now; she was too old, too hard, even toocynical. When one was young like Jean and Sybil, one had an endless store of faith and hope. There was still a glow over all life, and one ought to begin that way. Those first years—no matter what came afterward—would be the most precious in all their existence; and looking about her, she thought, “There are so few who ever have that chance, so few who can build upon a foundation so solid.”
Sometimes there returned to her a sudden twinge of the ancient, shameful jealousy which she had felt for Sybil’s youth that suffocating night on the terrace overlooking the sea. (In an odd way, all the summer unfolding itself slowly seemed to have grown out of that night.)
No, in the end she returned always to the same thought ... that she would sacrifice everything to the perfection of this thing which existed between Sybil and the impatient, red-haired young man.
When she was honest with herself, she knew that she would have had no panic, no terror, save for O’Hara. Save for him she would have had no fear of growing old, of seeing Sybil married and finding herself a grandmother. She had prayed for all these things, even that Fate should send Sybil just such a lover; and now that her prayer was answered there were times when she wished wickedly that he had not come, or at least not so promptly. When she was honest, the answer was always the same ... that O’Hara had come to occupy the larger part of her interest in existence.
In the most secret part of her soul, she no longer pretended that her feeling for him was only one of friendship. She was in love with him. She rose each morning joyfully to ride with him across the meadows, pleased that Sybil came with them less and less frequently; and on the days when he was kept in Boston a cloud seemed to darken all her thoughts and actions. She talked to him of his future, his plans, the progress of his campaign, as if already shewere his wife or his mistress. She played traitor to all her world whose fortunes rested on the success and power of his political enemies. She came to depend upon his quick sympathy. He had a Gaelic way of understanding her moods, her sudden melancholy, that had never existed in the phlegmatic, insensitive world of Pentlands.
She was honest with herself after the morning when, riding along the damp, secret paths of the birch thicket, he halted his horse abruptly and with a kind of anguish told her that he could no longer go on in the way they were going.
He said, “What do you want me to do? I am good for nothing. I can think of nothing but you ... all day and all night. I go to Boston and try to work and all the while I’m thinking of you ... thinking what is to be done. You must see what hell it is for me ... to be near you like this and yet to be treated only as a friend.”
Abruptly, when she turned and saw the suffering in his eyes, she knew there was no longer any doubt. She asked sadly, “What do you want me to do? What can I do? You make me feel that I am being the cheapest, silliest sort of woman.” And in a low voice she added, “I don’t mean to be, Michael.... I love you, Michael.... Now I’ve told you. You are the only man I’ve ever loved ... even the smallest bit.”
A kind of ecstatic joy took possession of him. He leaned over and kissed her, his own tanned face dampened by her tears.
“I’m so happy,” she said, “and yet so sad....”
“If you love me ... then we can go our way ... we need not think of any of the others.”
“Oh, it’s not so easy as that, my dear.” She had never before been so conscious of his presence, of that strange sense of warmth and charm which he seemed to impose on everything about him.
“I do have to think of the others,” she said. “Not my husband.... I don’t think he even cares so long as the world knows nothing. But there’s Sybil.... I can’t make a fool of myself on account of Sybil.”
She saw quickly that she had used the wrong phrase, that she had hurt him; striking without intention at the fear which he sometimes had that she thought him a common, vulgar Irish politician.
“Do you think that this thing between us ... might be called ‘making a fool of yourself’?” he asked with a faint shade of bitterness.
“No ... you know me better than that.... You know I was thinking only of myself ... as a middle-aged woman with a daughter ready to be married.”
“But shewillbe married ... soon ... surely. Young de Cyon isn’t the sort who waits.”
“Yes ... that’s true ... but even then.” She turned quickly. “What do you want me to do?... Do you want me to be your mistress?”
“I want you for my own.... I want you to marry me.”
“Do you want me as much as that?”
“I want you as much as that.... I can’t bear the thought of sharing you ... of having you belong to any one else.”
“Oh ... I’ve belonged to no one for a great many years now ... not since Jack was born.”
He went on, hurriedly, ardently. “It would change all my life. It would give me some reason to go on.... Save for you.... I’d chuck everything and go away.... I’m sick of it.”
“And you want me for my own sake ... not just because I’ll help your career and give you an interest in life.”
“For your own sake ... nothing else, Olivia.”
“You see, I ask because I’ve thought a great deal about it. I’m older than you, Michael. I seem young now....But at forty.... I’ll be forty in the autumn ... at forty being older makes a difference. It cuts short our time.... It’s not as if we were in our twenties.... I ask you, too, because you are a clever man and must see these things, too.”
“None of it makes any difference.” He looked so tragically in earnest, there was such a light in his blue eyes, that her suspicions died. She believed him.
“But we can’t marry ... ever,” she said, “so long as my husband is alive. He’ll never divorce me nor let me divorce him. It’s one of his passionate beliefs ... that divorce is a wicked thing. Besides, there has never been a divorce in the Pentland family. There have been worse things,” she said bitterly, “but never a divorce and Anson won’t be the first to break any tradition.”
“Will you talk to him?”
“Just now, Michael, I think I’d do anything ... even that. But it will do no good.” For a time they were both silent, caught in a profound feeling of hopelessness, and presently she said, “Can you go on like this for a little time ... until Sybil is gone?”
“We’re not twenty ... either of us. We can’t wait too long.”
“I can’t desert her yet. You don’t know how it is at Pentlands. I’ve got to save her, even if I lose myself. I fancy they’ll be married before winter ... even before autumn ... before he leaves. And then I shall be free. I couldn’t ... I couldn’t be your mistress now, Michael ... with Sybil still in there at Pentlands with me.... I may be quibbling.... I may sound silly, but it does make a difference ... because perhaps I’ve lived among them for too long.”
“You promise me that when she’s gone you’ll be free?”
“I promise you, Michael.... I’ve told you that I love you ... that you’re the only man I’ve ever loved ... even the smallest bit.”
“Mrs. Callendar will help us.... She wants it.”
“Oh, Sabine....” She was startled. “You haven’t spoken to her? You haven’t told her anything?”
“No.... But you don’t need to tell her such things. She has a way of knowing.” After a moment he said, “Why, even Higgins wants it. He keeps saying to me, in an offhand sort of way, as if what he said meant nothing at all, ‘Mrs. Pentland is a fine woman, sir. I’ve known her for years. Why, she’s even helped me out of scrapes. But it’s a pity she’s shut up in that mausoleum with all those dead ones. She ought to have a husband who’s a man. She’s married to a living corpse.’”
Olivia flushed. “He has no right to talk that way....”
“If you could hear him speak, you’d know that it’s not disrespect, but because he worships you. He’d kiss the ground you walk over.” And looking down, he added, “He says it’s a pity that a thoroughbred like you is shut up at Pentlands. You mustn’t mind his way of saying it. He’s something of a horse-breeder and so he sees such things in the light of truth.”
She knew, then, what O’Hara perhaps had failed to understand—that Higgins was touching the tragedy of her son, a son who should have been strong and full of life, like Jean. And a wild idea occurred to her—that she might still have a strong son, with O’Hara as the father, a son who would be a Pentland heir but without the Pentland taint. She might do what Savina Pentland had done. But she saw at once how absurd such an idea was; Anson would know well enough that it was nothisson.
They rode on slowly and in silence while Olivia thought wearily round and round the dark, tangled maze in which she found herself. There seemed no way out of it. She wascaught, shut in a prison, at the very moment when her chance of happiness had come.
They came suddenly out of the thicket into the lane that led from Aunt Cassie’s gazeboed house to Pentlands, and as they passed through the gate they saw Aunt Cassie’s antiquated motor drawn up at the side of the road. The old lady was nowhere to be seen, but at the sound of hoofs the rotund form and silly face of Miss Peavey emerged from the bushes at one side, her bulging arms filled with great bunches of some weed.
She greeted Olivia and nodded to O’Hara. “I’ve been gathering catnip for my cats,” she called out. “It grows fine and thick there in the damp ground by the spring.”
Olivia smiled ... a smile that gave her a kind of physical pain ... and they rode on, conscious all the while that Miss Peavey’s china-blue eyes were following them. She knew that Miss Peavey was too silly and innocent to suspect anything, but she would, beyond all doubt, go directly to Aunt Cassie with a detailed description of the encounter. Very little happened in Miss Peavey’s life and such an encounter loomed large. Aunt Cassie would draw from her all the tiny details, such as the fact that Olivia looked as if she had been weeping.
Olivia turned to O’Hara. “There’s nothing malicious about poor Miss Peavey,” she said, “but she’s a fool, which is far more dangerous.”
Asthe month of August moved toward an end there was no longer any doubt as to the “failing” of Aunt Cassie; it was confirmed by the very silence with which she surrounded the state of her health. For forty years one had discussed Aunt Cassie’s health as one discussed the weather—a thing ever present in the consciousness of man about which one could do nothing, and now Aunt Cassie ceased suddenly to speak of her health at all. She even abandoned her habit of going about on foot and took to making her round of calls in the rattling motor which she protested to fear and loathe, and she came to lean more and more heavily upon the robust Miss Peavey for companionship and support. Claiming a fear of burglars, she had Miss Peavey’s bed moved into the room next to hers and kept the door open between. She developed, Olivia discovered, an almost morbid terror of being left alone.
And so the depression of another illness came to add its weight to the burden of Jack’s death and the grief of John Pentland. The task of battling the cloud of melancholy which hung over the old house grew more and more heavy upon Olivia’s shoulders. Anson remained as usual indifferent to any changes in the life about him, living really in the past among all the sheaves of musty papers, a man not so much cold-blooded as bloodless, for there was nothing active nor calculating in his nature, but only a great inertia, a lackof all fire. And it was impossible to turn to Sabine, who in an odd way seemed as cold and detached as Anson; she appeared to stand at a little distance, waiting, watching them all, even Olivia herself. And it was of course unthinkable to cloud the happiness of Sybil by going to her for support.
There was at least O’Hara, who came more and more frequently to Pentlands, now that the first visit had been made and the ice was broken. Anson encountered him once in the hallway, coldly; and he had become very friendly with old John Pentland. The two had a common interest in horses and dogs and cattle, and O’Hara, born in the Boston slums and knowing very little on any of these subjects, perhaps found the old gentleman a valuable source of information. He told Olivia, “I wouldn’t come to the house except for you. I can’t bear to think of you there ... always alone ... always troubled.”
And in the evenings, while they played bridge or listened to Jean’s music, she sometimes caught his eye, watching her with the old admiration, telling her that he was ready to support her no matter what happened.
A week after the encounter with Miss Peavey at the catnip-bed, Peters came to Olivia’s room late in the afternoon to say, with a curious blend of respect and confidence, “He’s ill again, Mrs. Pentland.”
She knew what Peters meant; it was a kind of code between them.... The same words used so many times before.
She went quickly to the tall narrow library that smelled of dogs and apples and woodsmoke, knowing well enough what she would find there; and on opening the door she saw him at once, lying asleep in the big leather chair. The faint odor of whisky—a smell which had come long since to fill her always with a kind of horror—hung in the air, and on the mahogany desk stood three bottles, each nearly emptied. He slept quietly, one arm flung across his chest, the otherhanging to the floor, where the bony fingers rested limply against the Turkey-red carpet. There was something childlike in the peace which enveloped him. It seemed to Olivia that he was even free now of the troubles which long ago had left their mark in the harsh, bitter lines of the old face. The lines were gone, melted away somehow, drowned in the immense quiet of this artificial death. It was only thus, perhaps, that he slept quietly, untroubled by dreams. It was only thus that he ever escaped.
Standing in the doorway she watched him for a time, quietly, and then, turning, she said to Peters, “Will you tell Higgins?” and entering the door she closed the red-plush curtains, shutting out the late afternoon sunlight.
Higgins came, as he had done so many times before, to lock the door and sit there in the room, even sleeping on the worn leather divan, until John Pentland, wakening slowly and looking about in a dazed way, discovered his groom sitting in the same room, polishing a bridle or a pair of riding-boots. The little man was never idle. Something deep inside him demanded action: he must always be doing something. And so, after these melancholy occasions, a new odor clung to the library for days ... the fresh, clean, healthy odor of leather and harness-soap.
For two days Higgins stayed in the library, leaving it only for meals, and for two days the old lady in the north wing went unvisited. Save for this single room, there was no evidence of any change in the order of life at Pentlands. Jean, in ignorance of what had happened, came in the evenings to play. But Sabine knew; and Aunt Cassie, who never asked questions concerning the mysterious absence of her brother lest she be told the truth. Anson, as usual, noticed nothing. The only real change lay in a sudden display ofsulking and ill-temper on the part of Miss Egan. The invincible nurse even quarreled with the cook, and was uncivil to Olivia, who thought, “What next is to happen? I shall be forced to look for a new nurse.”
On the evening of the third day, just after dinner, Higgins opened the door and went in search of Olivia.
“The old gentleman is all right again,” he said. “He’s gone to bathe and he’d like to see you in the library in half an hour.”
She found him there, seated by the big mahogany desk, bathed and spotlessly neat in clean linen; but he looked very old and weary, and beneath the tan of the leathery face there was a pallor which gave him a yellowish look. It was his habit never to refer in any way to these sad occasions, to behave always as if he had only been away for a day or two and wanted to hear what had happened during his absence.
Looking up at her, he said gravely, “I wanted to speak to you, Olivia. You weren’t busy, were you? I didn’t disturb you?”
“No,” she said. “There’s nothing.... Jean and Thérèse are here with Sybil.... That’s all.”
“Sybil,” he repeated. “Sybil.... She’s very happy these days, isn’t she?” Olivia nodded and even smiled a little, in a warm, understanding way, so that he added, “Well, we mustn’t spoil her happiness. We mustn’t allow anything to happen to it.”
A light came into the eyes of Olivia. “No; we mustn’t,” she repeated, and then, “She’s a clever girl.... She knows what she wants from life, and that’s the whole secret. Most people never know until it’s too late.”
A silence followed this speech, so eloquent, so full of unsaid things, that Olivia grew uneasy.
“I wanted to talk to you about ...” he hesitated for a moment, and she saw that beneath the edge of the table hishands were clenched so violently that the bony knuckles showed through the brown skin. “I wanted to talk to you about a great many things.” He stirred and added abruptly, “First of all, there’s my will.”
He opened the desk and took out a packet of papers, separating them carefully into little piles before he spoke again. There was a weariness in all his movements. “I’ve made some changes,” he said, “changes that you ought to know about ... and there are one or two other things.” He looked at her from under the fierce, shaggy eyebrows. “You see, I haven’t long to live. I’ve no reason to expect to live forever and I want to leave things in perfect order, as they have always been.”
To Olivia, sitting in silence, the conversation became suddenly painful. With each word she felt a wall rising about her, shutting her in, while the old man went on and on with an agonizing calmness, with an air of being certain that his will would be obeyed in death as it had always been in life.
“To begin with, you will all be left very rich ... very rich ... something over six million dollars. And it’s solid money, Olivia ... money not made by gambling, but money that’s been saved and multiplied by careful living. For seventy-five years it’s been the tradition of the family to live on the income of its income. We’ve managed to do it somehow, and in the end we’re rich ... very rich.”
As he talked he kept fingering the papers nervously, placing them in neat little piles, arranging and rearranging them.
“And, as you know, Olivia, the money has been kept in a way so that the principal could never be spent. Sybil’s grandchildren will be able to touch some of it ... that is, if you are unwise enough to leave it to them that way.”
Olivia looked up suddenly. “But why me? What have I to do with it?”
“That’s what I’m coming to, Olivia dear.... It’s because I’m leaving control of the whole fortune to you.”
Suddenly, fiercely, she wanted none of it. She had a quick, passionate desire to seize all the neatly piled papers and burn them, to tear them into small bits and fling them out of the window.
“I don’t want it!” she said. “Why should you leave it to me? I’m rich myself. I don’t want it! I’m not a Pentland.... It’s not my money. I’ve nothing to do with it.” In spite of herself, there was a note of passionate resentment in her voice.
The shaggy brows raised faintly in a look of surprise.
“To whom, if not to you?” he asked.
After a moment, she said, “Why, Anson ... to Anson, I suppose.”
“You don’t really think that?”
“It’s his money ... Pentland money ... not mine. I’ve all the money I need and more.”
“It’s yours, Olivia....” He looked at her sharply. “You’re more a Pentland than Anson, in spite of blood ... in spite of name. You’re more a Pentland than any of them. It’s your money by every right in spite of anything you can do.”
(“But Anson isn’t a Pentland, nor you either,” thought Olivia.)
“It’s you who are dependable, who are careful, who are honorable, Olivia. You’re the strong one. When I die, you’ll be the head of the family.... Surely, you know that ... already.”
(“I,” thought Olivia, “I who have been so giddy, who am planning to betray you all.... I am all this!”)
“If I left it to Anson, it would be wasted, lost on foolish ideas. He’s no idea of business.... There’s a screw loose in Anson.... He’s a crank. He’d be giving away thisgood money to missionaries and queer committees ... societies for meddling in the affairs of people. That wasn’t what this fortune was made for. No, I won’t have Pentland money squandered like that....”
“And I,” asked Olivia. “How do you know what I will do with it?”
He smiled softly, affectionately. “I know what you’ll do with it, because I know you, Olivia, my dear.... You’ll keep it safe and intact.... You’re the Pentland of the family. You weren’t when you came here, but you are now. I mean that you belong to the grand tradition of Pentlands ... the old ones who hang out there in the hall. You’re the only one left ... for Sybil is too young. She’s only a child ... yet.”
Olivia was silent, but beneath the silence there ran a torrent of cold, rebellious thoughts. Being a Pentland, then, was not a matter of blood: it was an idea, even an ideal. She thought fiercely, “I’m not a Pentland. I’m alive. I am myself. I’ve not been absorbed into nothing. All these years haven’t changed me so much. They haven’t made me into a Pentland.” But for the sake of her affection, she could say none of these things. She only said, “How do you know what I’ll do with it? How do you know that I mightn’t squander it extravagantly—or—or even run away, taking all that was free with me. No one could stop me—no one.”
He only repeated what he had said before, saying it more slowly this time, as if to impress her. “I know what you’ll do with it, Olivia, because I know you, Olivia dear—you’d never do anything foolish or shameful—I know that—that’s why I trust you.”
And when she did not answer him, he asked, “You will accept it, won’t you, Olivia? You’ll have the help of a good lawyer ... one of the best... John Mannering. It will please me, Olivia, and it will let the world know what I think of you, what you have been to me all these years ... all that Anson has never been ... nor my own sister, Cassie.” He leaned across the table, touching her white hand gently. “You will, Olivia?”
It was impossible to refuse, impossible even to protest any further, impossible to say that in this very moment she wanted only to run away, to escape, to leave them all forever, now that Sybil was safe. Looking away, she said in a low voice, “Yes.”
It was impossible to desert him now ... an old, tired man. The bond between them was too strong; it had existed for too long, since that first day she had come to Pentlands as Anson’s bride and known that it was the father and not the son whom she respected. In a way, he had imposed upon her something of his own rugged, patriarchal strength. It seemed to her that she had been caught when she meant most to escape; and she was frightened, too, by the echoing thought that perhaps she had become, after all, a Pentland ... hard, cautious, unadventurous and a little bitter, one for whom there was no fire or glamour in life, one who worshiped a harsh, changeable, invisible goddess called Duty. She kept thinking of Sabine’s bitter remark about “the lower middle-class virtues of the Pentlands” ... the lack of fire, the lack of splendor, of gallantry. And yet this fierce old manwasgallant, in an odd fashion.... Even Sabine knew that.
He was talking again. “It’s not only money that’s been left to you.... There’s Sybil, who’s still too young to be let free....”
“No,” said Olivia with a quiet stubbornness, “she’s not too young. She’s to do as she pleases. I’ve tried to make her wiser than I was at her age ... perhaps wiser than I’ve ever been ... even now.”
“Perhaps you’re right, my dear. You have been so many times ... and things aren’t the same as they were in my day ... certainly not with young girls.”
He took up the papers again, fussing over them in a curious, nervous way, very unlike his usual firm, unrelenting manner. She had a flash of insight which told her that he was behaving thus because he wanted to avoid looking at her. She hated confidences and she was afraid now that he was about to tell her things she preferred never to hear. She hated confidences and yet she seemed to be a person who attracted them always.
“And leaving Sybil out of it,” he continued, “there’s queer old Miss Haddon in Durham whom, as you know, we’ve taken care of for years; and there’s Cassie, who’s growing old and ill, I think. We can’t leave her to half-witted Miss Peavey. I know my sister Cassie has been a burden to you.... She’s been a burden to me, all my life....” He smiled grimly. “I suppose you know that....” Then, after a pause, he said, “But most of all, there’s my wife.”
His voice assumed a queer, unnatural quality, from which all feeling had been removed. It became like the voices of deaf persons who never hear the sounds they make.
“I can’t leave her alone,” he said. “Alone ... with no one to care for her save a paid nurse. I couldn’t die and know that there’s no one to think of her ... save that wretched, efficient Miss Egan ... a stranger. No, Olivia ... there’s no one but you.... No one I can trust.” He looked at her sharply, “You’ll promise me to keep her here always ... never to let them send her away? You’ll promise?”
Again she was caught. “Of course,” she said. “Of course I’ll promise you that.” What else was she to say?
“Because,” he added, looking away from her once more,“because I owe her that ... even after I’m dead. I couldn’t rest if she were shut up somewhere ... among strangers. You see ... once ... once....” He broke off sharply, as if what he had been about to say was unbearable.
With Olivia the sense of uneasiness changed into actual terror. She wanted to cry out, “Stop!... Don’t go on!” But some instinct told her that he meant to go on and on to the very end, painfully, despite anything she could do.
“It’s odd,” he was saying quite calmly, “but there seem to be only women left ... no men ... for Anson is really an old woman.”
Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind of machine, he went on, “And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we needn’t think of him any longer.... But there’s Mrs. Soames....” He coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great agony. “There’s Mrs. Soames,” he repeated. “I know that you understand about her, Olivia ... and I’m grateful to you for having been kind and human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we’ve given Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty years ... but I don’t care about that. They’ve watched us ... they’ve known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house ... the very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world, Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my dear. They watch you ... they see everything you do. They almost know what you think ... and when they don’t know, they make it up. That’s one of the signs of a sick, decaying world ... that they get their living vicariously ... by watching some one else live ... that they live always in the past. That’s the only reason I everfelt sorry for Horace Pentland ... the only reason that I had sympathy for him. It was cruel that he should have been born in such a place.”
The bitterness ran like acid through all the speech, through the very timbre of his voice. It burned in the fierce black eyes where the fire was not yet dead. Olivia believed that she was seeing him now for the first time, in his fulness, with nothing concealed. And as she listened, the old cloud of mystery that had always hidden him from her began to clear away like the fog lifting from the marshes in the early morning. She saw him now as he really was ... a man fiercely masculine, bitter, clear-headed, and more human than the rest of them, who had never before betrayed himself even for an instant.
“But about Mrs. Soames.... If anything should happen to me, Olivia ... if I should die first, I want you to be kind to her ... for my sake and for hers. She’s been patient and good to me for so long.” The bitterness seemed to flow away a little now, leaving only a kindling warmth in its place. “She’s been good to me.... She’s always understood, Olivia, even before you came here to help me. You and she, Olivia, have made life worth living for me. She’s been patient ... more patient than you know. Sometimes I must have made life for her a hell on earth ... but she’s always been there, waiting, full of gentleness and sympathy. She’s been ill most of the time you’ve known her ... old and ill. You can’t imagine how beautiful she once was.”
“I know,” said Olivia softly. “I remember seeing her when I first came to Pentlands ... and Sabine has told me.”
The name of Sabine appeared to rouse him suddenly. He sat up very straight and said, “Don’t trust Sabine too far, Olivia. She belongs to us, after all. She’s very like my sister Cassie ... more like her than you can imagine. It’s why they hate each other so. She’s Cassie turned inside out,as you might say. They’d both sacrifice everything for the sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them. They live ... vicariously.”
Olivia would have interrupted him, defending Sabine and telling of the one real thing that had happened to her ... the tragic love for her husband; she would have told him of all the abrupt, incoherent confidences Sabine had made her; but the old man gave her no chance. It seemed suddenly that he had become possessed, fiercely intent upon pouring out to her all the dark things he had kept hidden for so long.
(She kept thinking, “Why must I know all these things? Why must I take up the burden? Why was it thatIshould find those letters which had lain safe and hidden for so long?”)
He was talking again quietly, the bony fingers weaving in and out their nervous futile pattern. “You see, Olivia.... You see, she takes drugs now ... and there’s no use in trying to cure her. She’s old now, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if she were young with all her life before her.”
Almost without thinking, Olivia answered, “I know that.”
He looked up quickly. “Know it?” he asked sharply. “How could you know it?”
“Sabine told me.”
The head bowed again. “Oh, Sabine! Of course! She’s dangerous. She knows far too much of the world. She’s known too many strange people.” And then he repeated again what he had said months ago after the ball. “She ought never to have come back here.”
Into the midst of the strange, disjointed conversation there came presently the sound of music drifting toward them from the distant drawing-room. John Pentland, who was a little deaf, did not hear it at first, but after a little time he sat up, listening, and turning toward her, asked, “Is that Sybil’s young man?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?”
“A very nice boy.”
After a silence he asked, “What’s the name of the thing he’s playing?”
Olivia could not help smiling. “It’s calledI’m in love again and the spring is a-comin’. Jean brought it back from Paris. A friend of his wrote it ... but names don’t mean anything in music any more. No one listens to the words.”
A shadow of amusement crossed his face. “Songs have queer names nowadays.”
She would have escaped, then, going quietly away. She stirred and even made a gesture toward leaving, but he raised his hand in the way he had, making her feel that she must obey him as if she were a child.
“There are one or two more things you ought to know, Olivia ... things that will help you to understand. Some one has to know them. Some one....” He halted abruptly and again made a great effort to go on. The veins stood out sharply on the bony head.
“It’s aboutherchiefly,” he said, with the inevitable gesture toward the north wing. “She wasn’t always that way. That’s what I want to explain. You see ... we were married when we were both very young. It was my father who wanted it. I was twenty and she was eighteen. My father had known her family always. They were cousins of ours, in a way, just as they were cousins of Sabine’s. He had gone to school with her father and they belonged to the same club and she was an only child with a prospect of coming into a great fortune. It’s an old story, you see, but a rather common one in our world.... All these things counted, and as for myself, I’d never had anything to do with women and I’d never been in love with any one. I was very young. I thinkthey saw it as a perfect match ... made in the hard, prosperous Heaven of their dreams. She was very pretty ... you can see even now that she must have been very pretty.... She was sweet, too, and innocent.” He coughed, and continued with a great effort. “She had ... she had a mind like a little child’s. She knew nothing ... a flower of innocence,” he added with a strange savagery.
And then, as if the effort were too much for him, he paused and sat staring out of the window toward the sea. To Olivia it seemed that he had slipped back across the years to the time when the poor old lady had been young and perhaps curiously shy of his ardent wooing. A silence settled again over the room, so profound that this time the faint, distant roaring of the surf on the rocks became audible, and then again the sound of Jean’s music breaking in upon them. He was playing another tune ... notI’m in love again, but one calledUkulele Lady.
“I wish they’d stop that damned music!” said John Pentland.
“I’ll go,” began Olivia, rising.
“No ... don’t go. You mustn’t go ... not now.” He seemed anxious, almost terrified, perhaps by the fear that if he did not tell now he would never tell her the long story that he must tell to some one. “No, don’t go ... not until I’ve finished, Olivia. I must finish.... I want you to know why such things happened as happened here yesterday and the day before in this room.... There’s no excuse, but what I have to tell you may explain it ... a little.”
He rose and opening one of the bookcases, took out a bottle of whisky. Looking at her, he said, “Don’t worry, Olivia, I shan’t repeat it. It’s only that I’m feeling weak. It will never happen again ... what happened yesterday ... never. I give you my word.”
He poured out a full glass and seated himself once more, drinking the stuff slowly while he talked.
“So we were married, I thinking that I was in love with her, because I knew nothing of such things ... nothing. It wasn’t really love, you see.... Olivia, I’m going to tell you the truth ... everything ... all of the truth. It wasn’t really love, you see. It was only that she was the only woman I had ever approached in that way ... and I was a strong, healthy young man.”
He began to speak more and more slowly, as if each word were thrust out by an immense effort of will. “And she knew nothing ... nothing at all. She was,” he said bitterly, “all that a young woman was supposed to be. After the first night of the honeymoon, she was never quite the same again ... never quite the same, Olivia. Do you know what that means? The honeymoon ended in a kind of madness, a fixed obsession. She’d been brought up to think of such things with a sacred horror and there was a touch of madness in her family. She was never the same again,” he repeated in a melancholy voice, “and when Anson was born she went quite out of her head. She would not see me or speak to me. She fancied that I had disgraced her forever ... and after that she could never be left alone without some one to watch her. She never went out again in the world....”
The voice died away into a hoarse whisper. The glass of whisky had been emptied in a supreme effort to break through the shell which had closed him in from all the world, from Olivia, whom he cherished, perhaps even from Mrs. Soames, whom he had loved. In the distance the music still continued, this time as an accompaniment to the hard, loud voice of Thérèse singing,I’m in love again and the spring is a-comin’.... Thérèse, the dark, cynical, invincible Thérèse for whom life, from frogs to men, held very few secrets.
“But the story doesn’t end there,” continued John Pentland weakly. “It goes on ... because I came to know what being in love might be when I met Mrs. Soames.... Only then,” he said sadly, as if he saw the tragedy from far off as a thing which had little to do with him. “Only then,” he repeated, “it was too late. After what I had done toher, it was too late to fall in love. I couldn’t abandon her. It was impossible. It ought never to have happened.” He straightened his tough old body and added, “I’ve told you all this, Olivia, because I wanted you to understand why sometimes I am....” He paused for a moment and then plunged ahead, “why I am a beast as I was yesterday. There have been times when it was the only way I could go on living.... And it harmed no one. There aren’t many who ever knew about it.... I always hid myself. There was never any spectacle.”
Slowly Olivia’s white hand stole across the polished surface of the desk and touched the brown, bony one that lay there now, quietly, like a hawk come to rest. She said nothing and yet the simple gesture carried an eloquence of which no words were capable. It brought tears into the burning eyes for the second time in the life of John Pentland. He had wept only once before ... on the night of his grandson’s death. And they were not, Olivia knew, tears of self-pity, for there was no self-pity in the tough, rugged old body; they were tears at the spectacle of a tragedy in which he happened by accident to be concerned.
“I wanted you to know, my dear Olivia ... that I have never been unfaithful toher, not once in all the years since our wedding-night.... I know the world will never believe it, but I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me ... and sheknowsthat it is true.”
And now that she knew the story was finished, she did not go away, because she knew that he wanted her to stay,sitting there beside him in silence, touching his hand. He was the sort of man—a man, she thought, like Michael—who needed women about him.
After a long time, he turned suddenly and asked, “This boy of Sybil’s—who is he? What is he like?”
“Sabine knows about him.”
“It’s that which makes me afraid.... He’s out of her world and I’m not so sure that I like it. In Sabine’s world it doesn’t matter who a person is or where he comes from as long as he’s clever and amusing.”
“I’ve watched him.... I’ve talked with him. I think him all that a girl could ask ... a girl like Sybil, I mean.... I shouldn’t recommend him to a silly girl ... he’d give such a wife a very bad time. Besides, I don’t think we can do much about it. Sybil, I think, has decided.”
“Has he asked her to marry him? Has he spoken to you?”
“I don’t know whether he’s asked her. He hasn’t spoken to me. Young men don’t bother about such things nowadays.”
“But Anson won’t like it. There’ll be trouble ... and Cassie, too.”
“Yes ... and still, if Sybil wants him, she’ll have him. I’ve tried to teach her that in a case like this ... well,” she made a little gesture with her white hand, “that she should let nothing make any difference.”
He sat thoughtfully for a long time, and at last, without looking up and almost as if speaking to himself, he said, “There was once an elopement in the family.... Jared and Savina Pentland were married that way.”
“But that wasn’t a happy match ... not too happy,” said Olivia; and immediately she knew that she had come near to betraying herself. A word or two more and he might have trapped her. She saw that it was impossible to add the burden of the letters to these other secrets.
As it was, he looked at her sharply, saying, “No one knows that.... One only knows that she was drowned.”
She saw well enough what he meant to tell her, by that vague hint regarding Savina’s elopement; only now he was back once more in the terrible shell; he was the mysterious, the false, John Pentland who could only hint but never speak directly.
The music ceased altogether in the drawing-room, leaving only the vague, distant, eternal pounding of the surf on the red rocks, and once the distant echo of a footstep coming from the north wing. The old man said presently, “So she wasn’t falling in love with this man O’Hara, after all? There wasn’t any need for worry?”
“No, she never thought of him in that way, even for a moment.... To her he seems an old man.... We mustn’t forget how young she is.”
“He’s not a bad sort,” replied the old man. “I’ve grown fond of him, and Higgins thinks he’s a fine fellow. I’m inclined to trust Higgins. He has an instinct about people ... the same as he has about the weather.” He paused for a moment, and then continued, “Still, I think we’d best be careful about him. He’s a clever Irishman on the make ... and such gentlemen need watching. They’re usually thinking only of themselves.”
“Perhaps,” said Olivia, in a whisper. “Perhaps....”
The silence was broken by the whirring and banging of the clock in the hall making ready to strike eleven. The evening had slipped away quickly, veiled in a mist of unreality. At last the truth had been spoken at Pentlands—the grim, unadorned, terrible truth; and Olivia, who had hungered for it for so long, found herself shaken.
John Pentland rose slowly, painfully, for he had grown stiff and brittle with the passing of the summer. “It’s eleven, Olivia. You’d better go to bed and get some rest.”
Shedid not go to her own room, because it would have been impossible to sleep, and she could not go to the drawing-room to face, in the mood which held her captive, such young faces as those of Jean and Thérèse and Sybil. At the moment she could not bear the thought of any enclosed place, of a room or even a place covered by a roof which shut out the open sky. She had need of the air and that healing sense of freedom and oblivion which the sight of the marshes and the sea sometimes brought to her. She wanted to breathe deeply the fresh salty atmosphere, to run, to escape somewhere. Indeed, for a moment she succumbed to a sense of panic, as she had done on the other hot night when O’Hara followed her into the garden.
She went out across the terrace and, wandering aimlessly, found herself presently moving beneath the trees in the direction of the marshes and the sea. This last night of August was hot and clear save for the faint, blue-white mist that always hung above the lower meadows. There had been times in the past when the thought of crossing the lonely meadows, of wandering the shadowed lanes in the darkness, had frightened her, but to-night such an adventure seemed only restful and quiet, perhaps because she believed that she could encounter there nothing more terrible than the confidences of John Pentland. She was acutely aware, as she had been on that other evening, of the breathless beauty of the night, of the velvety shadows along the hedges and ditches, of the brilliance of the stars, of the distant foaming white line of the sea and the rich, fertile odor of the pastures and marshes.
And presently, when she had grown a little more calm, she tried to bring some order out of the chaos that filledher body and spirit. It seemed to her that all life had become hopelessly muddled and confused. She was aware in some way, almost without knowing why, that the old man had tricked her, turning her will easily to his own desires, changing all the prospect of the future. She had known always that he was strong and in his way invincible, but until to-night she had never known the full greatness of his strength ... how relentless, even how unscrupulous he could be; for he had been unscrupulous, unfair, in the way he had used every weapon at hand ... every sentiment, every memory ... to achieve his will. There had been no fierce struggle in the open; it was far more subtle than that. He had subdued her without her knowing it, aided perhaps by all that dark force which had the power of changing them all ... even the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane into “Pentlands.”
Thinking bitterly of what had passed, she came to see that his strength rested upon the foundation of his virtue, hisrightness. One could say—indeed, one could believe it as one believed that the sun had risen yesterday—that all his life had been tragically foolish and quixotic, fantastically devoted to the hard, uncompromising ideal of what a Pentland ought to be; and yet ... yet one knew that he had been right, even perhaps heroic; one respected his uncompromising strength. He had made a wreck of his own happiness and driven poor old Mrs. Soames to seek peace in the Nirvana of drugs; and yet for her, he was the whole of life: she lived only for him. This code of his was hard, cruel, inhuman, sacrificing everything to its observance.... “Even,” thought Olivia, “to sacrificing me along with himself. But I will not be sacrificed. I will escape!”
And after a long time she began to see slowly what it was that lay at the bottom of the iron power he had over people, the strength which noneof them had been able to resist. It was a simple thing ... simply that hebelieved, passionately, relentlessly, as those first Puritans had done.
The others all about her did not matter. Not one of them had any power over her ... not Anson, nor Aunt Cassie, nor Sabine, nor Bishop Smallwood. None of them played any part in the course of her life. They did not matter. She had no fear of them; rather they seemed to her now fussy and pitiful.
But John Pentlandbelieved. It was that which made the difference.
Stumbling along half-blindly, she found herself presently at the bridge where the lane from Pentlands crossed the river on its way to Brook Cottage. Since she had been a little girl, the sight of water had exerted a strange spell upon her ... the sight of a river, a lake, but most of all the open sea; she had always been drawn toward these things like a bit of iron toward a magnet; and now, finding herself at the bridge, she halted, and stood looking over the stone parapet in the shadow of the hawthorn-bushes that grew close to the water’s edge, down on the dark, still pool below her. The water was black and in it the bright little stars glittered like diamonds scattered over its surface. The warm, rich odor of cattle filled the air, touched by the faint, ghostly perfume of the last white nympheas that bordered the pool.
And while she stood there, bathed in the stillness of the dark solitude, she began to understand a little what had really passed between them in the room smelling of whisky and saddle-soap. She saw how the whole tragedy of John Pentland and his life had been born of the stupidity, the ignorance, the hypocrisy of others, and she saw, too, that he was beyond all doubt the grandson of the Toby Cane who had written those wild passionate letters glorifying the flesh; onlyJohn Pentland had found himself caught in the prison of that other terrible thing—the code in which he had been trained, in which hebelieved. She saw now that it was not strange that he sought escape from reality by shutting himself in and drinking himself into a stupor. He had been caught, tragically, between those two powerful forces. He thought himself a Pentland and all the while there burned in him the fire that lay in Toby Cane’s letters and in the wanton look that was fixed forever in the portrait of Savina Pentland. She kept seeing him as he said, “I have never been unfaithful toher, not once in all the years since our wedding-night.... I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me ... and sheknowsthat it is true.”
It seemed to her that this fidelity was a terrible, a wicked, thing.
And she came to understand that through all their talk together, the thought, the idea, of Michael had been always present. It was almost as if they had been speaking all the while about Michael and herself. A dozen times the old man had touched upon it, vaguely but surely. She had no doubts that Aunt Cassie had long since learned all there was to learn from Miss Peavey of the encounter by the catnip-bed, and she was certain that she had taken the information to her brother. Still, there was nothing definite in anything Miss Peavey had seen, very little that was even suspicious. And yet, as she looked back upon her talk with the old man, it seemed to her that in a dozen ways, by words, by intonation, by glances, he had implied that he knew the secret. Even in the end when, cruelly, he had with an uncanny sureness touched the one fear, the one suspicion that marred her love for Michael, by saying in the most casual way, “Still, I think we’d better be careful of him. He’s a cleverIrishman on the make ... and such gentlemen need watching. They’re usually thinking only of themselves.”
And then the most fantastic of all thoughts occurred to her ... that all their talk together, even the painful, tragic confidence made with such an heroic effort, was directed at herself. He had done all this—he had emerged from his shell of reticence, he had humiliated his fierce pride—all to force her to give up Michael, to force her to sacrifice herself on the altar of that fantastic ideal in which he believed.
And she was afraid because he was so strong; because he had asked her to do nothing that he himself had not done.
She would never know for certain. She saw that, after all, the John Pentland she had left a little while before still remained an illusion, veiled in mystery, unfathomable to her, perhaps forever. She had not seen him at all.
Standing there on the bridge in the black shadow of the hawthorns, all sense of time or space, of the world about her, faded out of existence, so that she was aware of herself only as a creature who was suffering. She thought, “Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I have become like them, and that is why this struggle goes on and on. Perhaps if I were an ordinary person ... sane and simple ... like Higgins ... there would be no struggle and no doubts, no terror of simplyacting, without hesitation.”
She remembered what the old man had said of a world in which all action had become paralyzed, where one was content simply to watch others act, to live vicariously. The word “sane” had come to her quite naturally and easily as the exact word to describe a state of mind opposed to that which existed perpetually at Pentlands, and the thought terrified her that perhaps this thing which one called “being a Pentland,” this state of enchantment, was, after all, only a disease, a kindof madness that paralyzed all power of action. One came to live in the past, to acknowledge debts of honor and duty to people who had been dead for a century and more.
“Once,” she thought, “I must have had the power of doing what I wanted to do, what I thought right.”
And she thought again of what Sabine had said of New England as “a place where thoughts became higher and fewer,” where every action became a problem of moral conduct, an exercise in transcendentalism. It was passing now, even from New England, though it still clung to the world of Pentlands, along with the souvenirs of celebrated “dear friends.” Even stowing the souvenirs away in the attic had changed nothing. It was passing all about Pentlands; there was nothing of this sort in the New England that belonged to O’Hara and Higgins and the Polish mill-workers of Durham. The village itself had become a new and different place.
In the midst of this rebellion, she became aware, with that strange acuteness which seemed to touch all her senses, that she was no longer alone on the bridge in the midst of empty, mist-veiled meadows. She knew suddenly and with a curious certainty that there were others somewhere near her in the darkness, perhaps watching her, and she had for a moment a wave of the quick, chilling fear which sometimes overtook her at Pentlands at the times when she had a sense of figures surrounding her who could neither be seen nor touched. And almost at once she distinguished, emerging from the mist that blanketed the meadows, the figures of two people, a man and a woman, walking very close to each other, their arms entwined. For a moment she thought, “Am I really mad? Am I seeing ghosts in reality?” The fantastic idea occurred to her that the two figures were perhaps Savina Pentland and Toby Cane risen from their lost grave in the sea to wander across the meadows and marshes of Pentland. Movingthrough the drifting, starlit mist, they seemed vague and indistinct and watery, like creatures come up out of the water. She fancied them, all dripping and wet, emerging from the waves and crossing the white rim of beach on their way toward the big old house....
The sight, strangely enough, filled her with no sense of horror, but only with fascination.
And then, as they drew nearer, she recognized the man—something at first vaguely familiar in the cocky, strutting walk. She knew the bandy legs and was filled suddenly with a desire to laugh wildly and hysterically. It was only the rabbitlike Higgins engaged in some new conquest. Quietly she stepped farther into the shadow of the hawthorns and the pair passed her, so closely that she might have reached out her hand and touched them. It was only then that she recognized the woman. It was no Polish girl from the village, this time. It was Miss Egan—the starched, the efficient Miss Egan, whom Higgins had seduced. She was leaning on him as they walked—a strange, broken, feminine Miss Egan whom Olivia had never seen before.
At once she thought, “Old Mrs. Pentland has been left alone. Anything might happen. I must hurry back to the house.” And she had a quick burst of anger at the deceit of the nurse, followed by a flash of intuition which seemed to clarify all that had been happening since the hot night early in the summer when she had seen Higgins leaping the wall like a goat to escape the glare of the motor-lights. The mysterious woman who had disappeared over the wall that nightwasMiss Egan. She had been leaving the old woman alone night after night since then; it explained the sudden impatience and bad temper of these last two days when Higgins had been shut up with the old man.
She saw it all now—all that had happened in the past two months—in an orderly procession of events. The old womanhad escaped, leading the way to Savina Pentland’s letters, because Miss Egan had deserted her post to wander across the meadows at the call of that mysterious, powerful force which seemed to take possession of the countryside at nightfall. It was in the air again to-night, all about her ... in the air, in the fields, the sound of the distant sea, the smell of cattle and of ripening seeds ... as it had been on the night when Michael followed her out into the garden.
In a way, the whole chain of events was the manifestation of the disturbing force which had in the end revealed the secret of Savina’s letters. It had mocked them, and now the secret weighed on Olivia as a thing which she must tell some one, which she could no longer keep to herself. It burned her, too, with the sense of possessing a terrible and shameful weapon which she might use if pushed beyond endurance.
Slowly, after the two lovers had disappeared, she made her way back again toward the old house, which loomed square and black against the deep blue of the sky, and as she walked, her anger at Miss Egan’s betrayal of trust seemed to melt mysteriously away. She would speak to Miss Egan to-morrow, or the day after; in any case, the affair had been going on all summer and no harm had come of it—no harm save the discovery of Savina Pentland’s letters. She felt a sudden sympathy for this starched, efficient woman whom she had always disliked; she saw that Miss Egan’s life, after all, was a horrible thing—a procession of days spent in the company of a mad old woman. It was, Olivia thought, something like her own existence....
And it occurred to her at the same time that it would be difficult to explain to so sharp-witted a creature as Miss Egan why she herself should have been on the bridge at such an hour of the night. It was as if everything, each little thoughtand action, became more and more tangled and hopeless, more and more intricate and complicated with the passing of each day. There was no way out save to cut the web boldly and escape.
“No,” she thought, “I will not stay.... I will not sacrifice myself. To-morrow I shall tell Michael that when Sybil is gone, I will do whatever he wants me to do....”
When she reached the house she found it dark save for the light which burned perpetually in the big hall illuminating faintly the rows of portraits; and silent save for the creakings which afflicted it in the stillness of the night.
Shewas wakened early, after having slept badly, with the news that Michael had been kept in Boston the night before and would not be able to ride with her as usual. When the maid had gone away she grew depressed, for she had counted upon seeing him and coming to some definite plan. For a moment she even experienced a vague jealousy, which she put away at once as shameful. It was not, she told herself, that he ever neglected her; it was only that he grew more and more occupied as the autumn approached. It was not that there was any other woman involved; she felt certain of him. And yet there remained that strange, gnawing little suspicion, placed in her mind when John Pentland had said, “He’s a clever Irishman on the make ... and such gentlemen need watching.”
After all, she knew nothing of him save what he had chosen to tell her. He was a free man, independent, a buccaneer, who could do as he chose in life. Why should he ruin himself for her?
She rose at last, determined to ride alone, in the hope that the fresh morning air and the exercise would put to routthis cloud of morbidity which had kept possession of her from the moment she left John Pentland in the library.
As she dressed, she thought, “Day after to-morrow I shall be forty years old. Perhaps that’s the reason why I feel tired and morbid. Perhaps I’m on the borderland of middle-age. But that can’t be. I am strong and well and I look young, despite everything. I am tired because of what happened last night.” And then it occurred to her that perhaps Mrs. Soames had known these same thoughts again and again during her long devotion to John Pentland. “No,” she told herself, “whatever happens I shall never lead the life she has led. Anything is better than that ... anything.”
It seemed strange to her to awaken and find that nothing was changed in all the world about her. After what had happened the night before in the library and on the dark meadows, there should have been some mark left upon the life at Pentlands. The very house, the very landscape, should have kept some record of what had happened; and yet everything was the same. She experienced a faint shock of surprise to find the sun shining brightly, to see Higgins in the stable-yard saddling her horse and whistling all the while in an excess of high spirits, to hear the distant barking of the beagles, and to see Sybil crossing the meadow toward the river to meet Jean. Everything was the same, even Higgins, whom she had mistaken for a ghost as he crossed the mist-hung meadows a few hours earlier. It was as if there were two realities at Pentlands—one, it might have been said, of the daylight and the other of the darkness; as if one life—a secret, hidden one—lay beneath the bright, pleasant surface of a world composed of green fields and trees, the sound of barking dogs, the faint odor of coffee arising from the kitchen, and the sound of a groom whistling while he saddled a thoroughbred. It was a misfortune that chance had given her aninsight into both the bright, pleasant world and that other dark, nebulous one. The others, save perhaps old John Pentland, saw only this bright, easy life that had begun to stir all about her.
And she reflected that a stranger coming to Pentlands would find it a pleasant, comfortable house, where the life was easy and even luxurious, where all of them were protected by wealth. He would find them all rather pleasant, normal, friendly people of a family respected and even distinguished. He would say, “Here is a world that is solid and comfortable and sound.”
Yes, it would appear thus to a stranger, so it might be that the dark, fearful world existed only in her imagination. Perhaps she herself was ill, a little unbalanced and morbid ... perhaps a little touched like the old woman in the north wing.
Still, she thought, most houses, most families, must have such double lives—one which the world saw and one which remained hidden.
As she pulled on her boots she heard the voice of Higgins, noisy and cheerful, exchanging amorous jests with the new Irish kitchen-maid, marking her already for his own.
She rode listlessly, allowing the mare to lead through the birch thicket over the cool dark paths which she and Michael always followed. The morning air did not change her spirits. There was something sad in riding alone through the long green tunnel.
When at last she came out on the opposite side by the patch of catnip where they had encountered Miss Peavey, she saw a Ford drawn up by the side of the road and a man standing beside it, smoking a cigar and regarding the engine as if he were in trouble. She saw no more than that andwould have passed him without troubling to look a second time, when she heard herself being addressed.
“You’re Mrs. Pentland, aren’t you?”
She drew in the mare. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Pentland.”
He was a little man, dressed rather too neatly in a suit of checkered stuff, with a high, stiff white collar which appeared to be strangling him. He wore nose-glasses and his face had a look of having been highly polished. As she turned, he took off his straw hat and with a great show of manners came forward, bowing and smiling cordially.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that I’m right. I hoped I might meet you here. It’s a great pleasure to know you, Mrs. Pentland. My name is Gavin.... I’m by way of being a friend of Michael O’Hara.”
“Oh!” said Olivia. “How do you do?”
“You’re not in a great hurry, I hope?” he asked. “I’d like to have a word or two with you.”
“No, I’m not in a great hurry.”
It was impossible to imagine what this fussy little man, standing in the middle of the road, bowing and smiling, could have to say to her.
Still holding his hat in his hand, he tossed away the end of his cigar and said, “It’s about a very delicate matter, Mrs. Pentland. It has to do with Mr. O’Hara’s campaign. I suppose you know about that. You’re a friend of his, I believe?”
“Why, yes,” she said coldly. “We ride together.”
He coughed and, clearly ill at ease, set off on a tangent from the main subject. “You see, I’m a great friend of his. In fact, we grew up together ... lived in the same ward and fought together as boys. You mightn’t think it to see us together ... because he’s such a clever one.He’s made for big things and I’m not.... I’m ... I’m just plain John Gavin. But we’re friends, all the same, just the same as ever ... just as if he wasn’t a big man. That’s one thing about Michael. He never goes back on his old friends, no matter how great he gets to be.”
A light of adoration shone in the blue eyes of the little man. It was, Olivia thought, as if he were speaking of God; only clearly he thought of Michael O’Hara as greater than God. If Michael affected men like this, it was easy to see why he was so successful.