Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated, among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare, she made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland ancestors—the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina Pentland—and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband had not followed her in more than fifteen years.
Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the darkness, listening, listening, listening.... There was at first no sound save the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the white dunes and the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the direction of the kennels, and then, presently, there came to her the faint sound of soft, easy breathing from the adjoining room. It was regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son had been as strong as O’Hara or Higgins or that vigorous young de Cyon whom she had met once for a little while at Sabine’s house in Paris.
The sound filled her with a wild happiness, so that she forgot even what had happened in the drawing-room a little while before. As she undressed in the darkness she stopped now and then to listen again in a kind of fierce tension, as if by wishing it she could keep the sound from ever dying away. For more than three years she had never once entered this room free from the terror that there might only be silence to welcome her. And at last, after she had gone to bed and was falling asleep, she was wakened sharply by another sound, quite different, the sound of a wild, almost human cry ... savage and wicked, and followed by the thud thud of hoofs beating savagely against the walls of a stall, and then thevoice of Higgins, the groom, cursing wickedly. She had heard it before—the sound of old John Pentland’s evil, beautiful red mare kicking the walls of her stall and screaming wildly. There was an unearthly, implacable hatred between her and the little apelike man ... and yet a sort of fascination, too. As she sat up in her bed, listening, and still startled by the wild sound, she heard her son saying:
“Mama, are you there?”
“Yes.”
She rose and went into the other room, where, in the dim light from the night-lamp, the boy was sitting up in bed, his pale blond hair all rumpled, his eyes wide open and staring a little.
“You’re all right, Jack?” she whispered. “There’s nothing the matter?”
“No—nothing. I had a bad dream and then I heard the red mare.”
He looked pale and ill, with the blue veins showing on his temples; yet she knew that he was stronger than he had been for months. He was fifteen, and he looked younger than his age, rather like a boy of thirteen or fourteen, but he was old, too, in the timeless fashion of those who have always been ill.
“Is the party over?... Have they all gone?” he asked.
“Yes, Jack.... It’s almost daylight. You’d better try to sleep again.”
He lay down without answering her, and as she bent to kiss him good-night, she heard him say softly, “I wish I could have gone to the party.”
“You will, Jack, some day—before very long. You’re growing stronger every day.”
Again a silence, while Olivia thought bitterly, “He knows that I’m lying. He knows that what I’ve said is not the truth.”
Aloud she said, “You’ll go to sleep now—like a good boy.”
“I wish you’d tell me about the party.”
Olivia sighed. “Then I must close Nannie’s door, so we won’t waken her.” And she closed the door leading to the room where the old nurse slept, and seating herself on the foot of her son’s bed, she began a recital of who had been at the ball, and what had happened there, bit by bit, carefully and with all the skill she was able to summon. She wanted to give him, who had so little chance of living, all the sense of life she was able to evoke.
She talked on and on, until presently she noticed that the boy had fallen asleep and that the sky beyond the marshes had begun to turn gray and rose and yellow with the rising day.
WhenOlivia first came to the old house as the wife of Anson Pentland, the village of Durham, which lay inland from Pentlands and the sea, had been invisible, lying concealed in a fold of the land which marked the faint beginnings of the New Hampshire mountains. There had been in the view a certain sleepy peacefulness: one knew that in the distant fold of land surmounted by a single white spire there lay a quiet village of white wooden houses built along a single street called High Street that was dappled in summer with the shadows of old elm-trees. In those days it had been a country village, half asleep, with empty shuttered houses here and there falling into slow decay—a village with fewer people in it than there had been a hundred years before. It had stayed thus sleeping for nearly seventy-five years, since the day when a great migration of citizens had robbed it of its sturdiest young people. In the thick grass that surrounded the old meeting-house there lay a marble slab recording the event with an inscription which read:
From this spot on the fourteenth day of August, eighteen hundred and eighteen, the Reverend Josiah Milford, Pastor of this Church, with one hundred and ninety members of his congregation—men, women and children—set out, secure in their faith in Almighty God, to establish His Will and Power in the Wilderness of the Western Reserve.
From this spot on the fourteenth day of August, eighteen hundred and eighteen, the Reverend Josiah Milford, Pastor of this Church, with one hundred and ninety members of his congregation—men, women and children—set out, secure in their faith in Almighty God, to establish His Will and Power in the Wilderness of the Western Reserve.
Beneath the inscription were cut the names of those families who had made the journey to found a new town which had since surpassed sleepy Durham a hundred times in wealth and prosperity. There was no Pentland name among them, for the Pentlands had been rich even in the year eighteen hundred and eighteen, and lived in winter in Boston and in summer at Durham, on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first of the family.
From that day until the mills came to Durham the village sank slowly into a kind of lethargy, and the church itself, robbed of its strength, died presently and was changed into a dusty museum filled with homely early American furniture and spinning-wheels—a place seldom visited by any one and painted grudgingly every five years by the town council because it was popularly considered an historical monument. The Pentland family long ago had filtered away into the cold faith of the Unitarians or the more compromising and easy creeds of the Episcopal church.
But now, nearly twenty years after Olivia had come to Pentlands, the village was alive again, so alive that it had overflowed its little fold in the land and was streaming down the hill on the side next to the sea in straight, plain columns of ugly stucco bungalows, each filled with its little family of Polish mill-workers. And in the town, across High Street from the white-spired old meeting-house, there stood a new church, built of stucco and green-painted wood and dedicated to the great Church of Rome. In the old wooden houses along High Street there still lingered remnants of the old families ... old Mrs. Featherstone, who did washing to support four sickly grandchildren who ought never to have been born; Miss Haddon, a queer old woman who wore a black cape and lived on a dole from old John Pentland as a remote cousin of the family; Harry Peckhan, the village carpenter; old Mrs. Malson, living alone in a damp, gaunt andbeautiful old house filled with bits of jade and ivory brought back from China by her grandfather’s clippers; Miss Murgatroyd, who had long since turned her bullfinch house into a shabby tea-room. They remained here and there, a few worn and shabby-genteel descendants of those first settlers who had come into the country with the Pentlands.
But the mills had changed everything, the mills which poured wealth into the pockets of a dozen rich families who lived in summer within a few miles of Durham.
Even the countryside itself had changed. There were no longer any of the old New Englanders in possession of the land. Sometimes in riding along the lanes one encountered a thin, silly-faced remnant of the race sitting on a stone wall chewing a bit of grass; but that was all; the others had been swallowed up long ago in the mills of Salem and Lynn or died away, from too much inbreeding and too little nourishment. The few farms that remained fell into the hands of Poles and Czechs, solid, square people who were a little pagan in their closeness to the earth and the animals which surrounded them, sturdy people, not too moral, who wrought wonders with the barren, stony earth of New England and stood behind their walls staring wide-eyed while the grand people like the Pentlands rode by in pink coats surrounded by the waving nervous tails of foxhounds. And, one by one, other old farms were being turned back into a wilderness once more so that there would be plenty of room for the horses and hounds to run after foxes and bags of aniseed.
It had all changed enormously. From the upper windows of the big Georgian brick house where the Pentlands lived, one could see the record of all the changes. The windows commanded a wide view of a landscape composed of grubby meadows and stone walls, thickets of pine and white birches, marshes, and a winding sluggish brown river. Sometimes in the late autumn the deer wandered down from the mountainsof New Hampshire to spoil the fox-hunting by leading the hounds astray after game that was far too fleet for them.
And nearer at hand, nestled within a turn of the river, lay the land where Sabine Callender had been born and had lived until she was a grown woman—the land which she had sold carelessly to O’Hara, an Irish politician and a Roman Catholic, come up from nowhere to take possession of it, to clip its hedges, repair its sagging walls, paint its old buildings and put up gates and fences that were too shiny and new. Indeed, he had done it so thoroughly and so well that the whole place had a little the air of a suburban real estate development. And now Sabine had returned to spend the summer in one of his houses and to be very friendly with him in the face of Aunt Cassie and Anson Pentland, and a score of others like them.
Olivia knew this wide and somberly beautiful landscape, every stick and stone of it, from the perilous gravel-pit, half-hidden by its fringe of elder-bushes, to the black pine copse where Higgins had discovered only a day or two before a new litter of foxes. She knew it on gray days when it was cold and depressing, on those bright, terribly clear New England days when every twig and leaf seemed outlined by light, and on those damp, cold days when a gray fog swept in across the marshes from the sea to envelop all the countryside in gray darkness. It was a hard, uncompromising, stony country that was never too cheerful.
It was a country, too, which gave her an old feeling of loneliness ... a feeling which, strangely enough, seemed to increase rather than diminish as the years passed. She had never accustomed herself to its occasional dreariness. In the beginning, a long while ago, it had seemed to her green and peaceful and full of quiet, a place where she might find rest and peace ... but she had come long since to see it as it was, as Sabine had seen it while she stood in the window of the writing-room, frightened by the sudden queer apparitionof the little groom—a country beautiful, hard and cold, and a little barren.
Therewere times when the memories of Olivia’s youth seemed to sharpen suddenly and sweep in upon her, overwhelming all sense of the present, times when she wanted suddenly and fiercely to step back into that far-off past which had seemed then an unhappy thing, and these were the times when she felt most lonely, the times when she knew how completely, with the passing of years, she had drawn into herself; it was a process of protection like a tortoise drawing in its head. And all the while, in spite of the smiles and the politeness and the too facile amiability, she felt that she was really a stranger at Pentlands, that there were certain walls and barriers which she could never break down, past which she could never penetrate, certain faiths in which it was impossible for her to believe.
It was difficult now for her to remember very clearly what had happened before she came to Durham; it all seemed lost, confused, buried beneath the weight of her devotion to the vast family monument of the Pentlands. She had forgotten the names of people and places and confused the days and the years. At times it was difficult for her to remember the endless confusing voyages back and forth across the Atlantic and the vast, impersonal, vacuous hotels which had followed each other in the bleak and unreal procession of her childhood.
She could remember with a certain pitiful clarity two happy years spent at the school in Saint-Cloud, where for months at a time she had lived in a single room which she might call her own, where she had rested, free from the terror of hearing her mother say, “We must pack to-day. Weare leaving to-morrow for St. Petersburg or London or San Remo or Cairo....”
She could scarcely remember at all the immense house of chocolate-colored stone fitted with fantastic turrets and balconies that overlooked Lake Michigan. It had been sold and torn down long ago, destroyed like all else that belonged to the far-off past. She could not remember the father who had died when she was three; but of him there remained at least a yellowing photograph of a great, handsome, brawny man with a humorous Scotch-Irish face, who had died at the moment when his name was coming to be known everywhere as a power in Washington. No, nothing remained of him save the old photograph, and the tenuous, mocking little smile which had come down to her, the way she had of saying, “Yes! Yes!” pleasantly when she meant to act in quite the contrary fashion.
There were times when the memory of her own mother became vague and fantastic, as if she had been no more than a figure out of some absurd photograph of the early nineteen hundreds ... the figure of a pretty woman, dressed fashionably in clothes that flowed away in both directions, from a wasp waist. It was like a figure out of one of those old photographs which one views with a kind of melancholy amusement. She remembered a vain, rather selfish and pretty woman, fond of flattery, who had been shrewd enough never to marry any one of those gallant dark gentlemen with high-sounding titles who came to call at the eternal changeless hotel sitting-room, to take her out to garden parties and fêtes and races. And always in the background of the memory there was the figure of a dark little girl, overflowing with spirits and a hunger for friends, who was left behind to amuse herself by walking out with the Swiss governess, to make friends among the children she encountered in the parks or on the beaches and the boulevards of whatever European city her mother was visiting at the moment ... friends whom she saw to-day and who were vanished to-morrow never to be seen again. Her mother, she saw now, belonged to the America of the nineties. She saw her now less as a real person than a character out of a novel by Mrs. Wharton.
But she had never remarried; she had remained the rich, pretty Mrs. McConnel of Chicago until that tragic day (the clearest of all Olivia’s memories and the most terrible) when she had died of fever abruptly in a remote and squalid Italian village, with only her daughter (a girl of seventeen), a quack doctor and the Russian driver of her motor to care for her.
The procession of confused and not-too-cheerful memories came to a climax in a gloomy, red brick house off Washington Square, where she had gone as an orphan to live with a rigid, bejetted, maternal aunt who had believed that the whole world revolved about Lenox, the Hudson River Valley and Washington Square—an aunt who had never spoken to Olivia’s father because she, like Anson and Aunt Cassie, had a prejudice against Irishmen who appeared out of nowhere, engaging, full of life and high spirits.
So at eighteen she had found herself alone in the world save for one bejetted aunt, with no friends save those she had picked up as a child on beaches and promenades, whose names she could no longer even remember. And the only fixed world she knew was the world of the aunt who talked incessantly of the plush, camphor-smelling splendor of a New York which no longer existed.
Olivia saw it all clearly now. She saw why it was that when Anson Pentland came one night to call upon her aunt she had thought him an elegant and fascinating man whose presence at dinner had the power of transforming the solid walnut and mahogany dining-room into a brilliant place. He was what girls called “an older man,” and he had flattered her by his politeness and attentions. He had even taken herchaperoned by the aunt, to see a performance of “The City,” little knowing that the indecorousness to be unfolded there would force them to leave before the play was over. They had gone on a Thursday evening (she could even remember the very day) and she still smiled at the memory of their belief that a girl who had spent all her life in the corridors of European hotels should not know what the play was about.
And then it had all ended by her being asked to Pentlands for a visit ... to Pentlands, where she had come upon a world such as she had never known before, a world green and peaceful and secure, where every one was elaborately kind to her for reasons that she never learned until long afterward. They never even told her the truth about Anson’s mother, the old woman who lived in solitude in the north wing. She was, they said, too ill at the moment to see any one. Pentlands, in that far-off day, had seemed to the tired, friendless girl like some vast, soft green bed where she could fling herself down and rest forever, a world where she could make friends and send down roots that would hold her secure for all time. To a hotel child Pentlands was a paradise; so when Anson Pentland asked her to marry him, she accepted him because she did not find him actually repulsive.
And now, after all those years, it was spring again ... spring as when she had come to Pentlands for the first time, and she was thirty-nine years old and still young; only everything had changed.
Bit by bit, in the years that followed the birth of Sybil and then of Jack, the whole picture of the life at Pentlands and in the brownstone house on Beacon Street had come to assume a pattern, to take form out of the first confused and misty impressions, so that, looking back upon it, she was beginning to understand it all with the chill clarity of disillusion.
She saw herself as a shy young girl to whom they had all been elaborately kind because it was so necessary for Anson to have a wife and produce an heir.... Anson, the last male descendant of such a glorious family. (“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”) She saw herself as they must have seen her ... a pretty young girl, disarmed by their kindness, who was not known in their world but was at least charming and a lady and quite rich. (She knew now how much the money must have counted with Aunt Cassie.) And she saw Anson now, across all the expanse of years, not as a Prince Charming come to rescue her from an ogre aunt, but as he had really been ... a rather anemic man, past thirty, of an appalling propriety. (There was a bitter humor in the memories of his timid advances toward her, of all the distaste with which he approached the details of marriage ... a humor which she had come to understand fully only as she grew older and wiser in the ways of the world.) Looking back, she saw him as a man who had tried again and again to marry young women he had known all his life and who had failed because somehow he had gained a mysterious reputation for being a bore ... a young man who, left to himself, would never have approached any woman, and gone to the grave as virginal as he had been born.
She saw now that he had never been even in the slightest in love with her. He had married her only because he got no peace from all the others, both the living and the dead, who in such a strange fashion seemed also to live at Pentlands. It was Aunt Cassie and even poor silly Miss Peavey and powerful old John Pentland and the cousins and all those dead hanging in neat rows in the hall who had married her. Anson had only been an instrument; and even in the most bitter moments she felt strangely sorry for him, because he, too, had had all his life ruined.
And so, slowly during all those long years, the pretty, shy,unknown Olivia McConnel, whose father was a Democratic politician out of Chicago, had turned into this puzzled, sometimes unhappy woman, the outsider, who had come in some mysterious fashion to be the one upon whom all of them leaned for strength.
She was glad now that she had stood forth boldly at last and faced Anson and all those who stood behind him there in the drawing-room, both the living and the dead, peering over his shoulder, urging him on. The unpleasant argument, though it had wounded her, had cleared the air a little. It had laid bare for a second the reality which she had been seeking for so long a time. Anson had been right about Sabine: in the clear bright air of the New England morning she knew that it was the sense of Sabine’s nearness which had given her the strength to be unpleasant. Sabine, like herself, had known the great world, and so she was able to see their world here in Durham with a clarity that the others never approached. She was strong, too, in her knowledge that whatever happened she (Olivia) was the one person whom they could not afford to lose, because they had depended on her for too long.
But she was hurt. She kept thinking again and again of what Anson had said.... “In any case, I will not have my daughter marry a shanty Irishman. There is enough of that in the family.”
She knew that Anson would suffer from shame for what he had said, but she knew, too, that he would pretend nothing had happened, that he had never made such a speech, because it was unworthy of a gentleman and a Pentland. He would pretend, as he always did, that the scene had never occurred.
When he had made the speech he had meant that she ought to have been thankful that they allowed her to marry intothe Pentland family. There was a buried something in them all, a conviction that was a part of their very flesh, which made them believe in such a privilege. And for her who knew so much more than the world knew, who saw so much more than any of them of the truth, there was only one answer, to be wrung from her with a tragic intensity ... “Oh, my God!...”
Thedining-room was large and square, and having been redecorated in a period later than the rest of the house, was done in heavy mahogany, with a vast shiny table in the center which when reduced to its smallest possible circumference still left those who seated themselves about it formally remote from one another.
It was a well-used table, for since circumstance had kept John Pentland from going into the world, he had brought a part of it into his own home with a hospitality and a warmth that rather upset his sister Cassie. She, herself, like most of the family, had never cared very profoundly for food, looking upon it almost as a necessity. A prune to her palate shared importance as a delicacy with a truffle. In the secrecy of her own house, moved by her passion for economy, she more often than not assuaged her own birdlike appetite with scraps from the cupboard, though at such times the simple but full-blooded Miss Peavey suffered keenly. “A pick-up meal” was a byword with Aunt Cassie, and so she frowned upon the rich food furnished by old John Pentland and his daughter-in-law, Olivia.
Nevertheless, she took a great many meals at the mahogany table and even managed to insinuate within its circle the plump figure of Miss Peavey, whose silly laugh and servile echoes of his sister’s opinions the old man detested.
Anson never lunched at home, for he went up to Bostoneach morning at nine o’clock, like a man of affairs, with much business to care for. He kept an office in Water Street and went to it with a passionate regularity, to spend the day in the petty affairs of club committees and societies for the improvement of this or that; for he was a man who fortified his own soul by arranging the lives of others. He was chairman of a committee which “aired” young girls who had fallen into trouble, and contributed as much as he was able out of his own rather slender income to the activities of the Watch and Ward Society. And a large part of the day was spent in correspondence with genealogists on the subject of “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He did not in a whole year earn enough money to pay the office rent for one month, but he had no patience with the many cases of poverty and destitution which came to his notice. The stocks and bonds of the Pentland estate had been kept carefully out of his reach, by a father who distrusted activities such as Anson’s, and even now, when he was nearly fifty, Anson had only a small income left by his grandfather and an allowance, paid him each month by his father, as if he were still a boy in college.
So when Olivia came down to lunch on the day after the ball she was not forced to face Anson and his shame over the scene of the night before. There were only the grandfather and Sybil and Jack—who was well enough to come down.
The old man sat at the head, in the place which he had never relinquished as the dictator, the ruler of all the family. Tall and muscular, he had grown leathery from exposure during the years he had lived in the country, riding day after day in rains and blizzards, in sunlight and in storms, as if there were in him some atavistic hunger for the hardy life led by the first Pentlands to come to Durham. He always rode the vicious and unruly beautiful red mare ... a grim old man who was a match for her famous bad temper. He wasrather like his sister Cassie in appearance—one of the black Pentlands who had appeared mysteriously in the line nearly a hundred years earlier, and he had burning black eyes that looked out from shaggy brows ... a man as different in appearance and vigor from his son as it was possible to imagine. (For Anson was a typical Pentland—blond, with round blue eyes and an inclination when in health toward ruddiness.) One stood in awe of the old man: there was a grimness about the strong, rough-cut face and contracted lips, and a curious, indefinable air of disapproval which one was never able to pin down or analyze.
He was silent to-day, in one of the black moods which Olivia knew well meant that he was troubled. She knew that this time it had nothing to do with Jack’s illness, for the boy sat there opposite them, looking stronger than he had looked in months ... blond and pale and thin, with the blue veins showing at his pathetic wrists and on his thin, handsome temples.
Olivia had lived through bad times over Jack and she had lived through them always together with John Pentland, so there had grown up between them—the mother and the grandfather—a sense of understanding which was quite beyond speech. Together they had spent so many nights by the side of the boy, keeping him alive almost by the strength of their united wills, forcing him to live when, gasping for life, he would have slipped away easily into death. Together they had kept him in life, because they both loved him and because he was the last son of the family.
Olivia felt sometimes that Sybil, too, played a part in the never-ending struggle against death. The girl, like her grandfather, never spoke of such things, but one could read them in the troubled depths of her violet eyes. That long, weary struggle was one of the tragedies they never spoke of at Pentlands, leaving it buried in silence. One said, “Jack lookswell to-day,” smiling, and, “Perhaps the doctors are wrong.” Sybil was watching her brother now, in that quiet, mysterious way she had, watching him cautiously lest he discover that she was watching; for he discovered troubles easily, with the kind of clairvoyance which comes to people who have always been ill.
They barely talked at all during the lunch. Sybil planned to take her brother in the trap to ride over the farm and down to the white dunes.
“Higgins is going with us,” she said. “He’s going to show us the new litter of foxes in the black thicket.”
And Jack said, “It’s a funny thing about Higgins. He always discovers such things before any one else. He knows when it will be a good day for fishing and just when it is going to rain. He’s never wrong.”
“No ...” said the grandfather suddenly. “It’s a funny thing. He’s never wrong ... not in all the years I’ve known him.”
It was the only time he said anything during the meal, and Olivia, trying to fill in the gaps in the conversation, found it difficult, with the boy sitting opposite her looking so pale and ill. It seemed to her sometimes that he had never really been born, that he had always remained in some way a part of herself. When he was out of her sight, she had no peace because there was always a gnawing terror that she might never see him again. And she knew that deep inside the frail body there was a spirit, a flame, descended from the old man and from herself, which burned passionately with a desire for life, for riding, for swimming, for running across the open meadows ... a flame that must always be smothered. If only he had been like Anson, his father, who never knew that hunger for life....
“Olivia, my dear....” The old man was speaking.“Will you have your coffee with me in the library? There is something I want to discuss with you.”
She knew it then. She had been right. Therewassomething which troubled him. He always said the same thing when he was faced by some problem too heavy for his old shoulders. He always said, “Olivia, my dear.... Will you come into the library?” He never summoned his own son, or his sister Cassie ... no one but Olivia. Between them they shared secrets which the others never dreamed of; and when he died, all the troubles would be hers ... they would be passed on for her to deal with ... those troubles which existed in a family which the world would have said was rich and respected and quite without troubles.
Asshe left the room to follow him she stopped for a moment to say to Sybil, “Are you happy, my dear? You’re not sorry that you aren’t going back to school in Saint-Cloud?”
“No, Mama; why shouldn’t I be happy here? I love it, more than anything in the world.”
The girl thrust her hands into the pockets of her riding-coat.
“You don’t think I was wrong to send you to France to school ... away from every one here?”
Sybil laughed and looked at her mother in the frank, half-mocking way she had when she fancied she had uncovered a plot.
“Are you worrying about marrying me off? I’m only eighteen. I’ve lots of time.”
“I’m worrying because I think you’ll be so hard to please.”
Again she laughed. “That’s true. That’s why I’m going to take my time.”
“And you’re glad to have Thérèse here?”
“Of course. You know I like Thérèse awfully, Mama.”
“Very well ... run along now. I must speak to your grandfather.”
And the girl went out onto the terrace where Jack stood waiting in the sun for the trap. He always followed the sun, choosing to sit in it even in midsummer, as if he were never quite warm enough.
Shewasworried over Sybil. She had begun to think that perhaps Aunt Cassie was right when she said that Sybil ought to go to a boarding-school with the girls she had always known, to grow loud and noisy and awkward and play hockey and exchange silly notes with the boys in the boarding-school in the next village. Perhaps it was wrong to have sent Sybil away to a school where she would meet girls from France and England and Russia and South America ... half the countries of the world; a school where, as Aunt Cassie had said bitterly, she would be forced to associate with the “daughters of dancers and opera singers.” She knew now that Sybil hadn’t liked the ball any more than Thérèse, who had run away from it without a word of explanation. Only with Thérèse it didn’t matter so much, because the dark stubborn head was filled with all sorts of wild notions about science and painting and weird books on psychology. There was a loneliness about Thérèse and her mother, Sabine Callendar, only with them it didn’t matter. They had, too, a hardness, a sense of derision and scorn which protected them. Sybil hadn’t any such protections. Perhaps she was even wrong in having made of Sybil a lady—a lady in the old sense of the word—because there seemed to be no place for a lady in the scheme of life as it had existed at the dance the night before. It was perilous, having a lady on one’s hands, especially a lady who was certain to take life as passionately as Sybil.
She wanted the girl to be happy, without quite understanding that it was because Sybil seemed the girl she had once been herself, a very part of herself, the part which had never lived at all.
She found her father-in-law seated at his great mahogany desk in the high narrow room walled with books which was kept sacred to him, at the desk from which he managed the farm and watched over a fortune, built up bit by bit shrewdly, thriftily over three hundred years, a fortune which he had never brought himself to trust in the hands of his son. It was, in its gloomy, cold way, a pleasant room, smelling of dogs and apples and wood-smoke, and sometimes of whisky, for it was here that the old man retired when, in a kind of baffled frenzy, he drank himself to insensibility. It was here that he would sometimes sit for a day and a night, even sleeping in his leather chair, refusing to see any one save Higgins, who watched over him, and Olivia. And so it was Olivia and Higgins who alone knew the spectacle of this solitary drinking. The world and even the family knew very little of it—only the little which sometimes leaked out from the gossip of servants straying at night along the dark lanes and hedges about Durham.
He sat with his coffee and a glass of Courvoisier before him while he smoked, with an air of being lost in some profound worry, for he did not look up at once when she entered, but sat staring before him in an odd, enchanted fashion. It was not until she had taken a cigarette from the silver box and lighted it that he looked up at the sound of the striking match and, focusing the burning black eyes, said to her, “Jack seems very well to-day.”
“Yes, better than he has been in a long time.”
“Perhaps, after all, the doctors are wrong.”
Olivia sighed and said quietly, “If we had believed the doctors we should have lost him long ago.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
She poured her coffee and he murmured, “It’s about Horace Pentland I wanted to speak. He’s dead. I got the news this morning. He died in Mentone and now it’s a question whether we shall bring him home here to be buried in Durham with the rest of the family.”
Olivia was silent for a moment and then, looking up, said, “What do you think? How long has it been that he has lived in Mentone?”
“It’s nearly thirty years now that I’ve been sending him money to stay there. He’s only a cousin. Still, we had the same grandfather and he’d be the first of the family in three hundred years who isn’t buried here.”
“There was Savina Pentland....”
“Yes.... But she’s buried out there, and she would have been buried here if it had been possible.”
And he made a gesture in the direction of the sea, beyond the marshes where the beautiful Savina Pentland, almost a legend now, lay, somewhere deep down in the soft white sand at the bottom of the ocean.
“Would he want to be buried here?” asked Olivia.
“He wrote and asked me ... a month or two before he died. It seemed to be on his mind. He put it in a strange way. He wrote that he wanted to come home.”
Again Olivia was thoughtful for a time. “Strange ...” she murmured presently, “when people were so cruel to him.”
The lips of the old man stiffened a little.
“It was his own fault....”
“Still ... thirty years is a long time.”
He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. “You mean that everything may have been forgotten by now?”
Olivia made a little gesture with her white, ringless hands. “Why not?”
“Because people don’t forget things like that ... not in our world, at any rate.”
Quietly, far back in her mind, Olivia kept trying to imagine this Horace Pentland whom she had never seen, this shadowy old man, dead now, who had been exiled for thirty years.
“You have no reason for not wanting him here among all the others?”
“No ... Horace is dead now.... It can’t matter much whether what’s left of him is buried here or in France.”
“Except, of course, that they may have been kinder to him over there.... They’re not so harsh.”
A silence fell over them, as if in some way the spirit of Horace Pentland, the sinner whose name was never spoken in the family save between Olivia and the old man, had returned and stood between them, waiting to hear what was to be done with all that remained of him on this earth. It was one of those silences which, descending upon the old house, sometimes filled Olivia with a vague uneasiness. They had a way of descending upon the household in the long evenings when all the family sat reading in the old drawing-room—as if there were figures unseen who stood watching.
“If he wanted to be buried here,” said Olivia, “I can see no reason why he should not be.”
“Cassie will object to raking up an old scandal that has been forgotten.”
“Surely that can’t matter now ... when the poor old man is dead. We can be kind to him now ... surely we can be kind to him now.”
John Pentland sighed abruptly, a curious, heart-breaking sigh that seemed to have escaped even his power of steely control; and presentlyhe said, “I think you are right, Olivia.... I will do as you say ... only we’ll keep it a secret between us until the time comes when it’s necessary to speak. And then ... then we’ll have a quiet funeral.”
She would have left him then save that she knew from his manner that there were other things he wanted to say. He had a way of letting you know his will without speaking. Somehow, in his presence you felt that it was impossible to leave until he had dismissed you. He still treated his own son, who was nearly fifty, as if he were a little boy.
Olivia waited, busying herself by rearranging the late lilacs which stood in a tall silver vase on the polished mahogany desk.
“They smell good,” he said abruptly. “They’re the last, aren’t they?”
“The last until next spring.”
“Next spring ...” he repeated with an air of speaking to himself. “Next spring....” And then abruptly, “The other thing was about Sabine. The nurse tells meshehas discovered that Sabine is here.” He made the family gesture toward the old north wing. “She has asked to see Sabine.”
“Who told her that Sabine had returned? How could she have discovered it?”
“The nurse doesn’t know. She must have heard some one speaking the name under her window. The nurse says that people in her condition have curious ways of discovering such things ... like a sixth sense.”
“Do you want me to ask Sabine? She’d come if I asked her.”
“It would be unpleasant. Besides, I think it might do harm in some way.”
Olivia was silent for a moment. “How? She probably wouldn’t remember Sabine. When she saw her last, Sabine was a young girl.”
“She’s gotten the idea now that we’re all against her, that we’re persecuting her in some way.” He coughed and blewa cloud of smoke out of his thin-drawn lips. “It’s difficult to explain what I mean.... I mean that Sabine might encourage that feeling ... quite without meaning to, that Sabine might give her the impression that she was an ally. There’s something disturbing about Sabine.”
“Anson thinks so, too,” said Olivia softly. “He’s been talking to me about it.”
“She ought never to have come back here. It’s difficult ... what I am trying to say. Only I feel that she’s up to some mischief. I think she hates us all.”
“Not all of us....”
“Not perhaps you. You never belonged here. It’s only those of us who have always been here.”
“But she’s fond of you....”
“Her father and I were good friends. He was very like her ... disagreeable and given to speaking unpleasant truths.... He wasn’t a popular man. Perhaps that’s why she’s friendly toward me ... on account of him.”
“No, it’s more than that....”
Slowly Olivia felt herself slipping back into that state of confused enchantment which had overwhelmed her more and more often of late. It seemed that life grew more and more tenuous and complicated, more blurred and indistinct, until at times it became simply a morass of minute problems in which she found herself mired and unable to act. No one spoke directly any more. It was like living in a world of shadows. And this old man, her father-in-law, was the greatest puzzle of all, because it was impossible ever to know how much he understood of what went on about him, how much he chose to ignore in the belief that by denying its existence it would cease to exist.
Sitting there, puzzled, she began to pull a leaf from the cluster of lilacs into tiny bits.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think Sabine is unhappy....”
“No ... not that.... She’s beyond happiness or unhappiness. There’s something hard in her and unrelenting ... as hard as a cut diamond. She’s a clever woman and a queer one. She’s one of those strange creatures that are thrown off now and then by people like us. There’s nothing else quite like them in the world. They go to strange extremes. Horace was the same ... in a different, less creditable fashion.”
Olivia looked at him suddenly, astonished by the sudden flash of penetration in the old man, one of those sudden, quick gleams which led her to believe that far down, in the depths of his soul, he was far more profound, far more intelligent, unruly and defiant of tradition than he ever allowed the world to suppose. It was always the old question. How much did he know? How much did he not know ... far back, behind the lined, severe, leathery old face? Or was it a sort of clairvoyance, not of eternal illness, like Jack’s, but of old age?
“I shall ask Sabine,” she began.
“It’s not necessary at the moment. She appears to have forgotten the matter temporarily. But she’ll remember it again and then I think it will be best to humor her, whatever comes. She may not think of it again for months ... until Sabine has gone.... I only wanted to ask you ... to consult you, Olivia. I thought you could arrange it.”
She rose and, turning to go, she heard him saying, “Shemight like some lilacs in her room.” He hesitated and in a flat, dead voice, added, “She used to be very fond of flowers.”
Olivia, avoiding the dark eyes, thought, “She used to be very fond of flowers.... That means forty years ago ... forty long years. Oh, my God!” But after a second she said simply, “She has taken a dislike to flowers. She fancies they take up the air and stifle her. The sight of them is very bad for her.”
“I should have known you’d already thought of it.”
For an instant the old man stood facing her with a fixed and searching expression which made her feel shy and led her to turn away from him a little; and then all at once, with an air strangely timid and frightened in a man so grim in appearance, he took her hand and kissing her on the forehead murmured, “You’re a good girl, Olivia. They’re right in what they say of you. You’re a good girl. I don’t know how I should have managed without you all these years.”
Smiling, she looked at him, and then, touching his hand affectionately, she went out without speaking again, thinking, as she had thought a thousand times, what a terrible thing it must be to have been born so inarticulate and so terrified of feeling as John Pentland. It must be, she thought, like living forever imprisoned in a shell of steel from which one might look out and see friends but never touch or know them.
From the doorway she heard a voice behind her, saying almost joyfully: “The doctors must have been wrong about Jack. You and I together, Olivia, have defeated them.”
She said, “Yes,” and smiled at him, but when she had turned away again there was in her mind a strange, almost gruesome thought.
“If only Jack lives until his grandfather is dead, the old man will die happy. If only he can be kept alive until then....”
She had a strange way of seeing things in the hard light of reality, and an unreal, lonely childhood had fostered the trait. She had been born thus, and now as a woman she found that in a way it was less a curse than a blessing. In a world which survived only by deceiving itself, she found that seeing the truth and knowing it made her strong. Here, perhaps, lay the reason why all of them had come to depend upon her. But there were times, too, when she wanted passionately to be a poor weak feminine creature, a woman who might turn to her husband and find in him some one stronger than herself. She had a curious feeling of envy for Savina Pentland, who was dead before she was born.... Savina Pentland who had been the beauty of the family, extravagant, reckless, feminine, who bought strings of pearls and was given to weeping and fainting.
But she (Olivia) had only Anson to lean upon.
After she had gone away the old man sat for a long time smoking and drinking his brandy, enveloped by a loneliness scarcely more profound than it had been a little while before when he sat talking with Olivia. It was his habit to sit thus sometimes for an hour at a time, unconscious, it seemed, of all the world about him; Olivia had come in more than once at such moments and gone away again, unwilling to shatter the enchantment by so much as a single word.
At last, when the cigar had burned to an end, he crushed out the ember with a short, fierce gesture and, rising, went out of the tall narrow room and along the corridor that led to the dark stairway in the old north wing. These steps he had climbed every day since it had become necessary to keepherin the country the year round ... every day, at the same hour, step by step his big heavy-shod boots had trod the same worn stair carpet. It was a journey begun years ago as a kind of pleasure colored by hope, which for a long time now, bereft of all hope, had become merely a monotonous dreary duty. It was like a journey of penance made by some pilgrim on his knees up endless flights of stairs.
For more than twenty years, as far back as Olivia could remember, he had been absent from the house for a night but twice, and then only on occasions of life and death. In all that time he had been twice to New York and never onceto the Europe he had not seen since, as a boy, he had made the grand tour on a plan laid out by old General Curtis ... a time so remote now that it must have seemed part of another life. In all those years he had never once escaped from the world which his family found so perfect and complete and which to him must have seemed always a little cramped and inadequate. Fate and blood and circumstance, one might have said, had worn him down bit by bit until in the end he had come to worship the same gods they worshiped. Now and then he contrived to escape them for a little while by drinking himself into insensibility, but always he awakened again to find that nothing had changed, to discover that his prison was the same. And so, slowly, hope must have died.
But no one knew, even Olivia, whether he was happy or unhappy; and no one would ever really know what had happened to him, deep inside, behind the gray, leathery old face.
The world said, when it thought of him: “There never was such a devoted husband as John Pentland.”
Slowly and firmly he walked along the narrow hall to the end and there halted to knock on the white door. He always knocked, for there were times when the sight of him, entering suddenly, affected her so that she became hysterical and beyond all control.
In response to the knock, the door was opened gently and professionally by Miss Egan, an automaton of a nurse—neat, efficient, inhuman and incredibly starched, whose very smile seemed to come and go by some mechanical process, like the sounds made by squeezing a mechanical doll. Only it was impossible to imagine squeezing anything so starched and jagged as the red-faced Miss Egan. It was a smile which sprang into existence upon sight of any member of the family, a smile of false humility which said, “I know very well that you cannot do without me”—the smile of a woman well enough content to be paid three times the wages of an ordinary nurse. In three or four more years she would have enough saved to start a sanatorium of her own.
Fixing her smile, she faced the old man, saying, “She seems quite well to-day ... very quiet.”
The whole hallway had been flooded at the opening of the door by a thick and complicated odor arising from innumerable medicines that stood row upon row in the obscurity of the dark room. The old man stepped inside, closing the door quickly behind him, for she was affected by too much light. She could not bear to have a door or a window open near her; even on this bright day the drawn shades kept the room in darkness.
She had got the idea somehow that there were people outside who waited to leer at her ... hundreds of them all pressing their faces against the panes to peep into her bedroom. There were days when she could not be quieted until the window-shades were covered by thick layers of black cloth. She would not rise from her bed until nightfall lest the faces outside might see her standing there in her nightdress.
It was only when darkness had fallen that the nurse was able by means of trickery and wheedling to air the room, and so it smelled horribly of the medicines she never took, but kept ranged about her, row upon row, like the fetishes of witch-doctors. In this they humored her as they had humored her in shutting out the sunlight, because it was the only way they could keep her quiet and avoid sending her away to some place where she would have been shut behind bars. And this John Pentland would not even consider.
When he entered she was lying in the bed, her thin, frail body barely outlined beneath the bedclothes ... the mere shadow of a woman who must once have been pretty in a delicate way. But nothing remained now of the beauty save the fine modeling of the chin and nose and brow. She lay there, a queer, unreal old woman, with thin white hair, skinlike parchment and a silly, vacant face as unwrinkled as that of a child. As he seated himself beside her, the empty, round blue eyes opened a little and stared at him without any sign of recognition. He took one of the thin, blue-veined hands in his, but it only lay there, lifeless, while he sat, silent and gentle, watching her.
Once he spoke, calling her wistfully by name, “Agnes”; but there was no sign of an answer, not so much as a faint flickering of the white, transparent lids.
And so for an eternity he sat thus in the thick darkness, enveloped by the sickly odor of medicines, until he was roused by a knock at the door and the sudden glare of daylight as it opened and Miss Egan, fixing her flashing and teethy smile, came in and said: “The fifteen minutes is up, Mr. Pentland.”
When the door had closed behind him he went away again, slowly, thoughtfully, down the worn stairs and out into the painfully brilliant sunlight of the bright New England spring. Crossing the green terrace, bordered with great clumps of iris and peonies and a few late tulips, he made his way to the stable-yard, where Higgins had left the red mare in charge of a Polish boy who did odd tasks about the farm. The mare, as beautiful and delicate as a fine steel spring, stood nervously pawing the gravel and tossing her handsome head. The boy, a great lout with a shock of yellow hair, stood far away from her holding the reins at arm’s length.
At the sight of the two the old man laughed and said, “You mustn’t let her know you’re afraid of her, Ignaz.”
The boy gave up the reins and retired to a little distance, still watching the mare resentfully. “Well, she tried to bite me!” he said sullenly.
Quickly, with a youthful agility, John Pentland swung himself to her back ... quickly enough to keep her from sidling away from him. There was a short, fierce strugglebetween the rider and the horse, and in a shower of stones they sped away down the lane that led across the meadows, past the thicket of black pines and the abandoned gravel-pit, toward the house of Mrs. Soames.
Inthe solid corner of the world which surrounded Durham, Aunt Cassie played the rôle of an unofficial courier who passed from house to house, from piazza to piazza, collecting and passing on the latest bits of news. When one saw a low cloud of dust moving across the brilliant New England sky above the hedges and stone walls of the countryside, one could be certain that it masked the progress of Cassie Struthers on her daily round of calls. She went always on foot, because she detested motors and was terrified of horses; one might see her coming from a great distance, dressed always in dingy black, tottering along very briskly (for a woman of her age and well-advertised infirmities). One came to expect her arrival at a certain hour, for she was, unless there arose in her path some calamity or piece of news of unusual interest, a punctual woman whose life was as carefully ordered as the vast house in which she lived with the queer Aunt Bella.
It was a great box of a dwelling built by the late Mr. Struthers in the days of cupolas and gazebos on land given him by Aunt Cassie’s grandfather on the day of her wedding. Inside it was furnished with a great profusion of plush tassels and antimacassars, all kept with the neatness and rigidity of a museum. There were never any cigar ashes on the floor, nor any dust in the corners, for Aunt Cassie followed her servants about with the eye of a fussy old sergeant inspecting his barracks. Poor Miss Peavey, who grew more and more dowdy and careless as old age began to settle over her, led a life of constant peril, and was forced to build a little housenear the stables to house her Pomeranians and her Siamese cats. For Aunt Cassie could not abide the thought of “the animals dirtying up the house.” Even the “retiring room” of the late Mr. Struthers had been converted since his death into a museum, spotless and purified of tobacco and whisky, where his chair sat before his desk, turned away from it a little, as if his spirit were still seated there. On the desk lay his pipe (as he had left it) and the neat piles of paper (carefully dusted each day but otherwise undisturbed) which he had put there with his own hand on the morning they found him seated on the chair, his head fallen back a little, as if asleep. And in the center of the desk lay two handsomely bound volumes—“Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards”—which he had written in these last sad years when his life seemed slowly to fade from him ... the years in which Aunt Cassie seemed rapidly to recover the wiry strength and health for which she had been famous as a girl.
The house, people said, had been built by Mr. Struthers in the expectation of a large family, but it had remained great and silent of children’s voices as a tomb since the day it was finished, for Aunt Cassie had never been strong until it was too late for her to bear him heirs.
Sabine Callendar had a whole set of theories about the house and about the married life of Aunt Cassie, but they were theories which she kept, in her way, entirely to herself, waiting and watching until she was certain of them. There was a hatred between the two women that was implacable and difficult to define, an emotion almost of savagery which concealed itself beneath polite phrases and casual observations of an acid character. They encountered each other more frequently than Aunt Cassie would have wished, for Sabine, upon her return to Durham, took up Aunt Cassie’s habit of going from house to house on foot in search of news and entertainment. They met in drawing-rooms, on piazzas, and sometimes in the very dusty lanes, greeting each other with smiles and vicious looks. They had become rather like two hostile cats watching each other for days at a time, stealthily. Sabine, Aunt Cassie confided in Olivia, made her nervous.
Still, it was Aunt Cassie who had been the first caller at Brook Cottage after the arrival of Sabine. The younger woman had seen her approach, enveloped in a faint cloud of dust, from the windows of Brook Cottage, and the sight filled her with an inexpressible delight. The spare old lady had come along so briskly, almost with impatience, filled with delight (Sabine believed) at having an excuse now to trespass on O’Hara’s land and see what he had done to the old cottage. And Sabine believed, too, that she came to discover what life had done to “dear Mr. Struthers’ niece, Sabine Callendar.” She came as the Official Welcomer of the Community, with hope in her heart that she would find Sabine a returned prodigal, a wrecked woman, ravaged by time and experience, who for twenty years had ignored them all and now returned, a broken and humbled creature, hungry for kindness.
The sight set fire to a whole train of memories in Sabine ... memories which penetrated deep into her childhood when with her father she had lived in the old house that once stood where O’Hara’s new one raised its bright chimneys; memories of days when she had run off by herself to play in the tangled orchard grass among the bleeding-hearts and irises that surrounded this same Brook Cottage where she stood watching the approach of Aunt Cassie. Only, in those days Brook Cottage had been a ruin of a place, with empty windows and sagging doors, ghostly and half-hidden by a shaggy tangle of lilacs and syringas, and now it stood glistening with new paint, the lilacs all neatly clipped and pruned.
There was something in the sight of the old woman’s nervous, active figure that struck deep down into a past which Sabine, with the passing of years, had almost succeeded in forgetting; and now it all came back again, sharply and with a kind of stabbing pain, so that she had a sudden odd feeling of having become a little girl again ... plain, red-haired, freckled and timid, who stood in terror of Aunt Cassie and was always being pulled here and there by a thousand aunts and uncles and cousins because shewouldnot be turned into their idea of what a nice little girl ought to be. It was as if the whole past were concentrated in the black figure of the old lady who had been the ring-leader, the viceroy, of all a far-flung tribe, an old woman who had been old even twenty years earlier, lying always on a sofa under a shawl, issuing her edicts, pouring out her ample sympathies, her bitter criticisms. And here she was, approaching briskly, as if the death of Mr. Struthers had somehow released her from bonds which had chafed for too long.
Watching her, one incident after another flashed through the quick, hard brain of Sabine, all recreated with a swift, astounding clarity—the day when she had run off to escape into the world and been found by old John Pentland hiding in the thicket of white birches happily eating blueberries. (She could see his countenance now, stern with its disapproval of such wild behavior, but softening, too, at the sight of the grubby, freckled plain face stained with blueberry juice.) And the return of the captive, when she was surrounded by aunts who dressed her in a clean frock and forced her to sit in the funereal spare bedroom with a New Testament on her knees until she “felt that she could come out and behave like a nice, well-brought-up little girl.” She could see the aunts pulling and fussing at her and saying, “What a shame she didn’t take after her mother in looks!” and, “She’ll have a hard time with such plain, straight red hair.”
And there was, too, the memory of that day when AnsonPentland, a timid, spiritless little Lord Fauntleroy of a boy, fell into the river and would have been drowned save for his cousin Sabine, who dragged him out, screaming and drenched, only to receive for herself all the scolding for having led him into mischief. And the times when she had been punished for having asked frank and simple questions which she ought not to have asked.
It was difficult to remember any happiness until the day when her father died and she was sent to New York, a girl of twenty, knowing very little of anything and nothing whatever of such things as love and marriage, to live with an uncle in a tall narrow house on Murray Hill. It was on that day (she saw it now with a devastating clarity as she stood watching the approach of Aunt Cassie) that her life had really begun. Until then her existence had been only a confused and tormented affair in which there was very little happiness. It was only later that reality had come to her, painfully, even tragically, in a whole procession of events which had made her slowly into this hard, worldly, cynical woman who found herself, without quite knowing why, back in a world she hated, standing at the window of Brook Cottage, a woman tormented by an immense and acutely living curiosity about people and the strange tangles which their lives sometimes assumed.
She had been standing by the window thinking back into the past with such a fierce intensity that she quite forgot the approach of Aunt Cassie and started suddenly at the sound of the curious, familiar thin voice, amazingly unchanged, calling from the hallway, “Sabine! Sabine dear! It’s your Aunt Cassie! Where are you?” as if she had never left Durham at all, as if nothing had changed in twenty years.
At sight of her, the old lady came forward with little fluttering cries to fling her arms about her late husband’s niece. Her manner was that of a shepherd receiving a lostsheep, a manner filled with forgiveness and pity and condescension. The tears welled easily into her eyes and streamed down her face.
Sabine permitted herself, frigidly, to be embraced, and said, “But you don’t look a day older, Aunt Cassie. You look stronger than ever.” It was a remark which somehow set the whole tone of the relationship between them, a remark which, though it sounded sympathetic and even complimentary, was a harsh thing to say to a woman who had cherished all her life the tradition of invalidism. It was harsh, too, because it was true. Aunt Cassie at forty-seven had been as shriveled and dried as she was now, twenty years later.
The old woman said, “My dear girl, I am miserable ... miserable.” And drying the tears that streamed down her face, she added, “It won’t be long now until I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine wanted suddenly to laugh, at the picture of Aunt Cassie entering Paradise to rejoin a husband whom she had always called, even in the intimacy of married life, “Mr. Struthers.” She kept thinking that Mr. Struthers might not find the reunion so pleasant as his wife anticipated. She had always held a strange belief that Mr. Struthers had chosen death as the best way out.
And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused by Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement. Aunt Cassie could never bring herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She must say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine said, “Oh, no.... Oh, no.... Don’t say that.”
“I don’t sleep any more. I barely close my eyes at night.”
She had seated herself now and was looking about her, absorbing everything in the room, the changes made by the dreadful O’Hara, the furniture he had bought for the house. But most of all she was studying Sabine, devouring her withsidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine, knowing her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent shock. She had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she had found instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman, superbly dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight red hair the aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin slippers—a woman who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand and subdued it, who was in a way complete.
“Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you.” And again the easy tears welled up.
(“Oh,” thought Sabine, “you don’t catch me that way. You won’t put me back where I once was. You won’t even have a chance to meddle in my life.”)
Aloud she said, “It’s a pity I’ve always been so far away.”
“But I’ve thought of you, my dear.... I’ve thought of you. Scarcely a night passes when I don’t say to myself before going to sleep, ‘There is poor Sabine out in the world, turning her back on all of us who love her.’”She sighed abysmally. “I have thought of you, dear. I’ve prayed for you in the long nights when I have never closed an eye.”
And Sabine, talking on half-mechanically, discovered slowly that, in spite of everything, she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie. She was no longer a shy, frightened, plain little girl; she even began to sense a challenge, a combat which filled her with a faint sense of warmth. She kept thinking, “She really hasn’t changed at all. She still wants to reach out and take possession of me and my life. She’s like an octopus reaching out and seizing each member of the family, arranging everything.” And she saw Aunt Cassie now, after so many years, in a new light. It seemed to her that there was something glittering and hard and a little sinister beneath all the sighing and tears and easy sympathy. Perhaps she (Sabine) was the only one in all the family who had escaped the reach of those subtle, insinuating tentacles.... She had run away.
Meanwhile Aunt Cassie had swept from a vivid and detailed description of the passing of Mr. Struthers into a catalogue of neighborhood and family calamities, of deaths, of broken troths, financial disasters, and the appearance on the horizon of the “dreadful O’Hara.” She reproached Sabine for having sold her land to such an outsider. And as she talked on and on she grew less and less human and more and more like some disembodied, impersonal force of nature. Sabine, watching her with piercing green eyes, found her a little terrifying. She had sharpened and hardened with age.
She discussed the divorces which had occurred in Boston, and at length, leaning forward and touching Sabine’s hand with her thin, nervous one, she said brokenly: “I felt for you in your trouble, Sabine. I never wrote you because it would have been so painful. I see now that I evaded my duty. But I felt for you.... I tried to put myself in your place. I tried to imagine dear Mr. Struthers being unfaithful to me ... but, of course, I couldn’t. He was a saint.” She blew her nose and repeated with passion, as if to herself, “A saint!”
(“Yes,” thought Sabine, “a saint ... if ever there was one.”) She saw that Aunt Cassie was attacking her now from a new point. She was trying to pity her. By being full of pity the old woman would try to break down her defenses and gain possession of her.
Sabine’s green eyes took one hard, glinting look. “Did you ever see my husband?” she asked.