“No,” said Aunt Cassie, “but I’ve heard a great deal of him. I’ve been told how you suffered.”
Sabine looked at her with a queer, mocking expression. “Then you’ve been told wrongly. He is a fascinating man.I did not suffer. I assure you that I would rather have shared him with fifty other women than have had any one of the men about here all to myself.”
There was a frank immorality in this statement which put Aunt Cassie to rout, bag and baggage. She merely stared, finding nothing to say in reply to such a speech. Clearly, in all her life she had never heard any one say a thing so bald and so frank, so completely naked of all pretense of gentility.
Sabine went on coldly, pushing her assault to the very end. “I divorced him at last, not because he was unfaithful to me, but because there was another woman who wanted to marry him ... a woman whom I respect and like ... a woman who is still my friend. Understand that I loved him passionately ... in a very fleshly way. One couldn’t help it. I wasn’t the only woman.... He was a kind of devil, but a very fascinating one.”
The old woman was a little stunned but not by any means defeated. Sabine saw a look come into her eyes, a look which clearly said, “So this is what the world has done to my poor, dear, innocent little Sabine!” At last she said with a sigh, “I find it an amazing world. I don’t know what it is coming to.”
“Nor I,” replied Sabine with an air of complete agreement and sympathy. She understood that the struggle was not yet finished, for Aunt Cassie had a way of putting herself always in an impregnable position, of wrapping herself in layer after layer of sighs and sympathy, of charity and forgiveness, of meekness and tears, so that in the end there was no way of suddenly tearing them aside and saying, “There you are ... naked at last, a horrible meddling old woman!” And Sabine kept thinking, too, that if Aunt Cassie had lived in the days of her witch-baiting ancestor, Preserved Pentland, she would have been burned for a witch.
And all the while Sabine had been suffering, quietly, deep inside, behind the frankly painted face ... suffering in a way which no one in the world had ever suspected; for it was like tearing out her heart, to talk thus of Richard Callendar, even to speak his name.
Aloud she said, “And how is Mrs. Pentland.... I mean Olivia ... not my cousin.... I know howsheis ... no better.”
“No better.... It is one of those things which I can never understand.... Why God should have sent such a calamity to a good man like my brother.”
“But Olivia ...” began Sabine, putting an end abruptly to what was clearly the prelude to a pious monologue.
“Oh!... Olivia,” replied Aunt Cassie, launching into an account of the young Mrs. Pentland. “Olivia is an angel ... an angel, a blessing of God sent to my poor brother. But she’s not been well lately. She’s been rather sharp with me ... even with poor Miss Peavey, who is so sensitive. I can’t imagine what has come over her.”
It seemed that the strong, handsome Olivia was suffering from nerves. She was, Aunt Cassie said, unhappy about something, although she could not see why Olivia shouldn’t be happy ... a woman with everything in the world.
“Everything?” echoed Sabine. “Has any one in the world got everything?”
“It is Olivia’s fault if she hasn’t everything. All the materials are there. She has a good husband ... a husband who never looks at other women.”
“Nor at his own wife either,” interrupted Sabine. “I know all about Anson. I grew up with him.”
Aunt Cassie saw fit to ignore this. “She’s rich,” she said, resuming the catalogue of Olivia’s blessings.
And again Sabine interrupted, “But what does money mean Aunt Cassie? In our world one is rich and that’s the endof it. One takes it for granted. When one isn’t rich any longer, one simply slips out of it. It has very little to do with happiness....”
The strain was beginning to show on Aunt Cassie. “You’d find out if you weren’t rich,” she observed with asperity, “if your father and great-grandfather hadn’t taken care of their money.” She recovered herself and made a deprecating gesture. “But don’t think I’m criticizing dear Olivia. She is the best, the most wonderful woman.” She began to wrap herself once more in kindliness and charity and forgiveness. “Only she seems to me to be a little queer lately.”
Sabine’s artificially crimson mouth took on a slow smile. “It would be too bad if the Pentland family drove two wives insane—one after the other.”
Again Aunt Cassie came near to defeat by losing her composure. She snorted, and Sabine helped her out by asking: “And Anson?” ironically. “What is dear Anson doing?”
She told him of Anson’s great work, “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” and of its immense value as a contribution to the history of the nation; and when she had finished with that, she turned to Jack’s wretched health, saying in a low, melancholy voice, “It’s only a matter of time, you know.... At least, so the doctors say.... With a heart like that it’s only a matter of time.” The tears came again.
“And yet,” Sabine said slowly, “You say that Olivia has everything.”
“Well,” replied Aunt Cassie, “perhaps not everything.”
Before she left she inquired for Sabine’s daughter and was told that she had gone over to Pentlands to see Sybil.
“They went to the same school in France,” said Sabine. “They were friends there.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I was against Sybil’s goingabroad to school. It fills a girl’s head with queer ideas ... especially a school like that where any one could go. Since she’s home, Sybil behaves very queerly.... I think it’ll stand in the way of her success in Boston. The boys don’t like girls who are different.”
“Perhaps,” said Sabine, “she may marry outside of Boston. Men aren’t the same everywhere. Even in Boston there must be one or two who don’t refer to women as ‘Good old So-and-so.’ Even in Boston there must be men who like women who are well dressed ... women who are ladies....”
Aunt Cassie began to grow angry again, but Sabine swept over her. “Don’t be insulted, Aunt Cassie. I only mean ladies in the old-fashioned, glamorous sense..... Besides,” she continued, “whom could she marry who wouldn’t be a cousin or a connection of some sort?”
“She ought to marry here ... among the people she’s always known. There’s a Mannering boy who would be a good match, and James Thorne’s youngest son.”
Sabine smiled. “So you have plans for her already. You’ve settled it?”
“Of course, nothing is settled. I’m only thinking of it with Sybil’s welfare in view. If she married one of those boys she’d know what she was getting. She’d know that she was marrying a gentleman.”
“Perhaps ...” said Sabine. “Perhaps.” Somehow a devil had taken possession of her and she added softly, “There was, of course, Horace Pentland.... One can never be quite sure.” (She never forgot anything, Sabine.)
And at the same moment she saw, standing outside the door that opened on the terrace next to the marshes, a solid, dark, heavy figure which she recognized with a sudden feeling of delight as O’Hara. He had been walking across the fields with the wiry little Higgins, who had left him and continued on his way down the lane in the direction of Pentlands. At the sight of him, Aunt Cassie made every sign of an attempt to escape quickly, but Sabine said in a voice ominous with sweetness, “You must meet Mr. O’Hara. I think you’ve never met him. He’s a charming man.” And she placed herself in such a position that it was impossible for the old woman to escape without losing every vestige of dignity.
Then Sabine called gently, “Come in, Mr. O’Hara.... Mrs. Struthers is here and wants so much to meet her new neighbor.”
The door opened and O’Hara stepped in, a swarthy, rather solidly built man of perhaps thirty-five, with a shapely head on which the vigorous black hair was cropped close, and with blue eyes that betrayed his Irish origin by the half-hidden sparkle of amusement at this move of Sabine’s. He had a strong jaw and full, rather sensual, lips and a curious sense of great physical strength, as if all his clothes were with difficulty modeled to the muscles that lay underneath. He wore no hat, and his skin was a dark tan, touched at the cheek-bones by the dull flush of health and good blood.
He was, one would have said at first sight, a common, vulgar man in that narrow-jawed world about Durham, a man, perhaps, who had come by his muscles as a dock-laborer. Sabine had thought him vulgar in the beginning, only to succumb in the end to a crude sort of power which placed him above the realm of such distinctions. And she was a shrewd woman, too, devoted passionately to the business of getting at the essence of people; she knew that vulgarity had nothing to do with a man who had eyes so shrewd and full of mockery.
He came forward quietly and with a charming air of deference in which there was a faint suspicion of nonsense, a curious shadow of vulgarity, only one could not be certain whether he was not being vulgar by deliberation.
“It is a great pleasure,” he said. “Of course, I have seen Mrs. Struthers many times ... at the horse shows ... the whippet races.”
Aunt Cassie was drawn up, stiff as a poker, with an air of having found herself unexpectedly face to face with a rattlesnake.
“I have had the same experience,” she said. “And of course I’ve seen all the improvements you have made here on the farm.” The word “improvements” she spoke with a sort of venom in it, as if it had been instead a word like “arson.”
“We’ll have some tea,” observed Sabine. “Sit down, Aunt Cassie.”
But Aunt Cassie did not unbend. “I promised Olivia to be back at Pentlands for tea,” she said. “And I am late already.” Pulling on her black gloves, she made a sudden dip in the direction of O’Hara. “We shall probably see each other again, Mr. O’Hara, since we are neighbors.”
“Indeed, I hope so....”
Then she kissed Sabine again and murmured, “I hope, my dear, that you will come often to see me, now that you’ve come back to us. Make my house your own home.” She turned to O’Hara, finding a use for him suddenly in her warfare against Sabine. “You know, Mr. O’Hara, she is a traitor, in her way. She was raised among us and then went away for twenty years. She hasn’t any loyalty in her.”
She made the speech with a stiff air of playfulness, as if, of course, she were only making a joke and the speech meant nothing at all. Yet the air was filled with a cloud of implications. It was the sort of tactics in which she excelled.
Sabine went with her to the door, and when she returned she discovered O’Hara standing by the window, watching the figure of Aunt Cassie as she moved indignantly down the road in the direction of Pentlands. Sabine stood there for a moment, studying the straight, strong figure outlined againstthe light, and she got suddenly a curious sense of the enmity between him and the old woman. They stood, the two of them, in a strange way as the symbols of two great forces—the one negative, the other intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of decay, the other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever reconcile them. According to the scheme of things, they would be implacable enemies to the end. But Sabine had no doubts as to the final victor; the same scheme of things showed small respect for all that Aunt Cassie stood for. That was one of the wisdoms Sabine had learned since she had escaped from Durham into the uncompromising realities of the great world.
When she spoke, she said in a noncommittal sort of voice, “Mrs. Struthers is a remarkable woman.”
And O’Hara, turning, looked at her with a sudden glint of humor in his blue eyes. “Extraordinary ... I’m sure of it.”
“And a powerful woman,” said Sabine. “Wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove. It is never good to underestimate such strength. And now.... How do you like your tea?”
He took no tea but contented himself with munching a bit of toast and afterward smoking a cigar, clearly pleased with himself in a naïve way in the rôle of landlord coming to inquire of his tenant whether everything was satisfactory. He had a liking for this hard, clever woman who was now only a tenant of the land—his land—which she had once owned. When he thought of it—that he, Michael O’Hara, had come to own this farm in the midst of the fashionable and dignified world of Durham—there was something incredible in the knowledge, something which never ceased to warm him with a strong sense of satisfaction. By merely turning his head, he could see in the mirror the reflectionof the long scar on his temple, marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a youthful fight along the India Wharf. He, Michael O’Hara, without education save that which he had given himself, without money, without influence, had raised himself to this position before his thirty-sixth birthday. In the autumn he would be a candidate for Congress, certain of election in the back Irish districts. He, Michael O’Hara, was on his way to being one of the great men of New England, a country which had once been the tight little paradise of people like the Pentlands.
Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.
Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a microscope. She was finding out all about him; and he understood that, for it was a trick in which he, himself, was well-practised. It was by such methods that he had got ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too, that she should have come out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could be so utterly different from it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since ... that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.
They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of understanding unusual in two people who had known each other for so short a time; they spoke of the farm, of Pentlands, of the mills and the Poles in Durham, of the country as it had been in the days when Sabine was a child. And all the while he had that sense of her weighing and watching him, of feeling out the faint echo of a brogue in his speech and the rather hard, nasal quality that remained from those days along India Wharf and the memories of a ne’er-do-well, superstitious Irish father.
He could not have known that she was a woman who included among her friends men and women of a dozen nationalities, who lived a life among the clever, successful people of the world ... the architects, the painters, the politicians, the scientists. He could not have known the ruthless rule she put up against tolerating any but people who were “complete.” He could have known nothing of her other life in Paris, and London, and New York, which had nothing to do with the life in Durham and Boston. And yet he did know.... He saw that, despite the great difference in their worlds, there was a certain kinship between them, that they had both come to look upon the world as a pie from which any plum might be drawn if one only knew the knack.
And Sabine, on her side, not yet quite certain about casting aside all barriers, was slowly reaching the same understanding. There was no love or sentimentality in the spark that flashed between them. She was more than ten years older than O’Hara and had done with such things long ago. It was merely a recognition of one strong person by another.
It was O’Hara who first took advantage of the bond. In the midst of the conversation, he had turned the talk rather abruptly to Pentlands.
“I’ve never been there and I know very little of the life,” he said, “but I’ve watched it from a distance and it interestsme. It’s like something out of a dream, completely dead ... dead all save for young Mrs. Pentland and Sybil.”
Sabine smiled. “You know Sybil, then?”
“We ride together every morning.... We met one morning by chance along the path by the river and since then we’ve gone nearly every day.”
“She’s a charming girl.... She went to school in France with my daughter, Thérèse. I saw a great deal of her then.”
Far back in her mind the thought occurred to her that there would be something very amusing in the prospect of Sybil married to O’Hara. It would produce such an uproar with Anson and Aunt Cassie and the other relatives.... A Pentland married to an Irish Roman Catholic politician!
“She is like her mother, isn’t she?” asked O’Hara, sitting forward a bit on his chair. He had a way of sitting thus, in the tense, quiet alertness of a cat.
“Very like her mother.... Her mother is a remarkable woman ... a charming woman ... also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things, a really good and generous woman.”
“I’ve thought that.... I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to help me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she had a passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse ... though she scarcely knew me. She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to know her. But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I haven’t seen her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me. Sometimes I feel sorry for her.... It must be a queer life for a woman like that ... young and beautiful.”
“She has a great deal to occupy her at Pentlands. And it’s true that it’s not a very fascinating life. Still, I’m sure she couldn’t bear being pitied.... She’s the last woman in the world to want pity.”
Curiously, O’Hara flushed, the red mounting slowly beneath the dark-tanned skin.
“I thought,” he said a little sadly, “that her husband or Mrs. Struthers might have raised objections.... I know how they feel toward me. There’s no use pretending not to know.”
“It is quite possible,” said Sabine.
There was a sudden embarrassing silence, which gave Sabine time to pull her wits together and organize a thousand sudden thoughts and impressions. She was beginning to understand, bit by bit, the real reasons of their hatred for O’Hara, the reasons which lay deep down underneath, perhaps so deep that none of them ever saw them for what they were.
And then out of the silence she heard the voice of O’Hara saying, in a queer, hushed way, “I mean to ask something of you ... something that may sound ridiculous. I don’t pretend that it isn’t, but I mean to ask it anyway.”
For a moment he hesitated and then, rising quickly, he stood looking away from her out of the door, toward the distant blue marshes and the open sea. She fancied that he was trembling a little, but she could not be certain. What she did know was that he made an immense and heroic effort, that for a moment he, a man who never did such things, placed himself in a position where he would be defenseless and open to being cruelly hurt; and for the moment all the recklessness seemed to flow out of him and in its place there came a queer sadness, almost as if he felt himself defeated in some way....
He said, “What I mean to ask you is this.... Will you ask me sometimes here to the cottage when she will be here too?” He turned toward her suddenly and added, “It will mean a great deal to me ... more than you can imagine.”
She did not answer him at once, but sat watching him with a poorly concealed intensity; and presently, flicking the cigarette ashes casually from her gown, she asked, “And do you think it would be quite moral of me?”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her in astonishment, as if he had expected her, least of all people in the world, to ask such a thing.
“It might,” he said, “make us both a great deal happier.”
“Perhaps ... perhaps not. It’s not so simple as that. Besides, it isn’t happiness that one places first at Pentlands.”
“No.... Still....” He made a sudden vigorous gesture, as if to sweep aside all objections.
“You’re a queer man.... I’ll see what can be done.”
He thanked her and went out shyly without another word, to stride across the meadows, his black head bent thoughtfully, in the direction of his new bright chimneys. At his heels trotted the springer, which had lain waiting for him outside the door. There was something about the robust figure, crossing the old meadow through the blue twilight, that carried a note of lonely sadness. The self-confidence, the assurance, seemed to have melted away in some mysterious fashion. It was almost as if one man had entered the cottage a little while before and another, a quite different man, had left it just now. Only one thing, Sabine saw, could have made the difference, and that was the name of Olivia.
When he had disappeared Sabine went up to her room overlooking the sea and lay there for a long time thinking. She was by nature an indolent woman, especially at times when her brain worked with a fierce activity. It was working thus now, in a kind of fever, confused and yet tremendously clear; for the visits from Aunt Cassie and O’Hara had ignited her almost morbid passion for vicarious experience. She had a sense of being on the brink of some calamity which, beginning long ago in a hopeless tangle of origins and motives, wasready now to break forth with the accumulated force of years.
It was only now that she began to understand a little what it was that had drawn her back to a place which held memories so unhappy as those haunting the whole countryside of Durham. She saw that it must have been all the while a desire for vindication, a hunger to show them that, in spite of everything, of the straight red hair and the plain face, the silly ideas with which they had filled her head, in spite even of her unhappiness over her husband, she had made of her life a successful, even a brilliant, affair. She had wanted to show them that she stood aloof now and impregnable, quite beyond their power to curb or to injure her. And for a moment she suspected that the half-discerned motive was an even stronger thing, akin perhaps to a desire for vengeance; for she held this world about Durham responsible for the ruin of her happiness. She knew now, as a worldly woman of forty-six, that if she had been brought up knowing life for what it was, she might never have lost the one man who had ever roused a genuine passion in a nature so hard and dry.
It was all confused and tormented and vague, yet the visit of Aunt Cassie, filled with implications and veiled attempts to humble her, had cleared the air enormously.
And behind the closed lids, the green eyes began to see a whole procession of calamities which lay perhaps within her power to create. She began to see how it might even be possible to bring the whole world of Pentlands down about their heads in a collapse which could create only freedom and happiness to Olivia and her daughter. And it was these two alone for whom she had any affection; the others might be damned, gloriously damned, while she stood by without raising a finger.
She began to see where the pieces of the puzzle lay, thewedges which might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world that once more surrounded her.
Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of power, of having all the tools at hand, of being thedea ex machinâof the calamity.
She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the end even money could not save them. There came a time when a great fortune might be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.
She was still lying there when Thérèse came in—a short, plain, rather stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead. She was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired unhappy little girl had been so many times in that far-off, half-forgotten childhood.
“Where have you been?” she asked indifferently, for there was always a curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.
“Catching frogs to dissect,” said Thérèse. “They’re damned scarce and I slipped into the river.”
Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance of marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found satisfaction in the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse’s life so that no one could ever hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer nomadic life they had led together, meeting all sorts of men and women who were, in Sabine’s curious senseof the word, “complete,” the girl had pierced her way somehow to the bottom of things. She was building her young life upon a rock, so that she could afford to feel contempt for the very forces which long ago had hurt her mother. She might, like O’Hara, be suddenly humbled by love; but that, Sabine knew, was a glorious thing well worth suffering.
She knew it each time that she looked at her child and saw the clear gray eyes of the girl’s father looking out of the dark face with the same proud look of indifferent confidence which had fascinated her twenty years ago. So long as Thérèse was alive, she would never be able wholly to forget him.
“Go wash yourself,” she said. “Old Mr. Pentland and Olivia and Mrs. Soames are coming to dine and play bridge.”
As she dressed for dinner she no longer asked herself, “Why did I ever imagine Thérèse might find a husband here? What ever induced me to come back here to be bored all summer long?”
She had forgotten all that. She began to see that the summer held prospects of diversion. It might even turn into a fascinating game. She knew that her return had nothing to do with Thérèse’s future; she had been drawn back into Durham by some vague but overwhelming desire for mischief.
WhenAnson Pentland came down from the city in the evening, Olivia was always there to meet him dutifully and inquire about the day. The answers were always the same: “No, there was not much doing in town,” and, “It was very hot,” or, “I made a discovery to-day that will be of great use to me in the book.”
Then after a bath he would appear in tweeds to take his exercise in the garden, pottering about mildly and peering closely with his near-sighted blue eyes at little tags labeled “General Pershing” or “Caroline Testout” or “Poincaré” or “George Washington” which he tied carefully on the new dahlias and roses and smaller shrubs. And, more often than not, the gardener would spend half the next morning removing the tags and placing them on the proper plants, for Anson really had no interest in flowers and knew very little about them. The tagging was only a part of his passion for labeling things; it made the garden at Pentlands seem a more subdued and ordered place. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that he went through life ticketing and pigeonholing everything that came his way: manners, emotions, thoughts, everything. It was a habit that was growing on him in middle-age.
Dinner was usually late because Anson liked to take advantage of the long summer twilights, and after dinner it was the habit of all the family, save Jack, who went to bed immediately afterward, to sit in the Victorian drawing-room, reading and writing letters or sometimes playing patience, withAnson in his corner at Mr. Lowell’s desk working over “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and keeping up a prodigious correspondence with librarians and old men and women of a genealogical bent. The routine of the evening rarely changed, for Anson disliked going out and Olivia preferred not to go alone. It was only with the beginning of the summer, when Sybil was grown and had begun to go out occasionally to dinners and balls, and the disturbing Sabine, with her passion for playing bridge, had come into the neighborhood, that the routine was beginning to break up. There were fewer evenings now with Olivia and Sybil playing patience and old John Pentland sitting by the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or simply staring silently before him, lost in thought.
There were times in those long evenings when Olivia, looking up suddenly and for no reason at all, would discover that Sybil was sitting in the same fashion watching her, and both of them would know that they, like old John Pentland, had been sitting there all the while holding books in their hands without knowing a word of what they had read. It was as if a kind of enchantment descended upon them, as if they were waiting for something. Once or twice the silence had been broken sharply by the unbearable sound of groans coming from the north wing whenshehad been seized suddenly by one of her fits of violence.
Anson’s occasional comment and Olivia’s visits to Jack’s room to see that nothing had happened to him were the only interruptions. They spoke always in low voices when they played double patience in order not to disturb Anson at his work. Sometimes he encountered a bit of information for which he had been searching for a long time and then he would turn and tell them of it.
There was the night when he made his discovery about Savina Pentland....
“I was right about Savina Pentland,” he said. “Shewasa first cousin and not a second cousin of Toby Cane.”
Olivia displayed an interest by saying, “Was that what you wrote to theTranscriptabout?”
“Yes ... and I was sure that the genealogical editor was wrong. See ... here it is in one of Jared Pentland’s letters at the time she was drowned.... Jared was her husband.... He refers to Toby Cane as her only male first cousin.”
“That will help you a great deal,” said Olivia, “won’t it?”
“It will help clear up the chapter about the origins of her family.” And then, after a little pause, “I wish that I could get some trace of the correspondence between Savina Pentland and Cane. I’m sure it would be full of things ... but it seems not to exist ... only one or two letters which tell nothing.”
And then he relapsed again into a complete and passionate silence, lost in the rustle of old books and yellowed letters, leaving the legend of Savina Pentland to take possession of the others in the room.
The memory of this woman had a way of stealing in upon the family unaware, quite without their willing it. She was always there in the house, more lively than any of the more sober ancestors, perhaps because of them all she alone had been touched by splendor; she alone had been in her reckless way a great lady. There was a power in her recklessness and extravagance which came, in the end, to obscure all those other plain, solemn-faced, thrifty wives whose portraits adorned the hall of Pentlands, much as a rising sun extinguishes the feeble light of the stars. And about her obscure origin there clung a perpetual aura of romance, since there was no one to know just who her mother was or exactly whence she came. The mother was born perhaps of stock no humbler than the first shopkeeping Pentland to land on the Cape, but there was inher the dark taint of Portuguese blood; some said that she was the daughter of a fisherman. And Savina herself had possessed enough of fascination to lure a cautious Pentland into eloping with her against the scruples that were a very fiber of the Pentland bones and flesh.
The portrait of Savina Pentland stood forth among the others in the white hall, fascinating and beautiful not only because the subject was a dark, handsome woman, but because it had been done by Ingres in Rome during the years when he made portraits of tourists to save himself from starvation. It was the likeness of a small but voluptuous woman with great wanton dark eyes and smooth black hair pulled back from a camellia-white brow and done in a little knot on the nape of the white neck—a woman who looked out of the old picture with the flashing, spirited glance of one who lived boldly and passionately. She wore a gown of peach-colored velvet ornamented with the famous parure of pearls and emeralds given her, to the scandal of a thrifty family, by the infatuated Jared Pentland. Passing the long gallery of portraits in the hallway it was always Savina Pentland whom one noticed. She reigned there as she must have reigned in life, so bold and splendorous as to seem a bit vulgar, especially in a world of such sober folk, yet so beautiful and so spirited that she made all the others seem scarcely worth consideration.
Even in death she had remained an “outsider,” for she was the only one of the family who did not rest quietly among the stunted trees at the top of the bald hill where the first Pentlands had laid their dead. All that was left of the warm, soft body lay in the white sand at the bottom of the ocean within sight of Pentlands. It was as if fate had delivered her in death into a grave as tempestuous and violent as she had been in life. And somewhere near her in the restless white sand lay Toby Cane, with whom she had gone sailing onebright summer day when a sudden squall turned a gay excursion into a tragedy.
Even Aunt Cassie, who distrusted any woman with gaze so bold and free as that set down by the brush of Ingres—even Aunt Cassie could not annihilate the glamour of Savina’s legend. For her there was, too, another, more painful, memory hidden in the knowledge that the parure of pearls and emeralds and all the other jewels which Savina Pentland had wrung from her thrifty husband, lay buried somewhere in the white sand between her bones and those of her cousin. To Aunt Cassie Savina Pentland seemed more than merely a reckless, extravagant creature. She was an enemy of the Pentland fortune and of all the virtues of the family.
The family portraits were of great value to Anson in compiling his book, for they represented the most complete collection of ancestors existing in all America. From the portrait of the emigrating Pentland, painted in a wooden manner by some traveling painter of tavern signs, to the rather handsome one of John Pentland, painted at middle-age in a pink coat by Sargent, and the rather bad and liverish one of Anson, also by Mr. Sargent, the collection was complete save for two—the weak Jared Pentland who had married Savina, and the Pentland between old John’s father and the clipper-ship owner, who had died at twenty-three, a disgraceful thing for any Pentland to have done.
The pictures hung in a neat double row in the lofty hall, arranged chronologically and without respect for lighting, so that the good ones like those by Ingres and Sargent’s picture of old John Pentland and the unfinished Gilbert Stuart of Ashur Pentland hung in obscure shadows, and the bad ones like the tavern-sign portrait of the first Pentland were exposed in a glare of brilliant light.
This father of all the family had been painted at the great age of eighty-nine and looked out from his wooden background, a grim, hard-mouthed old fellow with white hair and shrewd eyes set very close together. It was a face such as one might find to-day among the Plymouth Brethren of some remote, half-forgotten Sussex village, the face of a man notable only for the toughness of his body and the rigidity of a mind which dissented from everything. At the age of eighty-four, he had been cast out for dissension from the church which he had come to regard as his own property.
Next to him hung the portrait of a Pentland who had been a mediocrity and left not even a shadowy legend; and then appeared the insolent, disagreeable face of the Pentland who had ducked eccentric old women for witches and cut off the ears of peace-loving Quakers in the colony founded in “freedom to worship God.”
The third Pentland had been the greatest evangelist of his time, a man who went through New England holding high the torch, exhorting rude village audiences by the coarsest of language to such a pitch of excitement that old women died of apoplexy and young women gave birth to premature children. The sermons which still existed showed him to be a man uncultivated and at times almost illiterate, yet his vast energy had founded a university and his fame as an exhorter and “the flaming sword of the Lord” had traveled to the ignorant and simple-minded brethren of the English back country.
The next Pentland was the eldest of the exhorter’s twenty children (by four wives), a man who clearly had departed from his father’s counsels and appeared in his portrait a sensual, fleshly specimen, very fat and almost good-natured, with thick red lips. It was this Pentland who had founded the fortune which gave the family its first step upward in the direction of the gentility which had ended with the figure of Anson bending over “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He had made a large fortune byequipping privateers and practising a near-piracy on British merchantmen; and there was, too, a dark rumor (which Anson intended to overlook) that he had made as much as three hundred per cent profit on a single shipload of negroes in the African slave trade.
After him there were portraits of two Pentlands who had taken part in the Revolution and then another hiatus of mediocrity, including the gap represented by the missing Jared; and then appeared the Anthony Pentland who increased the fortune enormously in the clipper trade. It was the portrait of a swarthy, powerful man (the first of the dark Pentlands, who could all be traced directly to Savina’s Portuguese blood), painted by a second-rate artist devoted to realism, who had depicted skilfully the warts which marred the distinguished old gentleman. In the picture he stood in the garden before the Pentland house at Durham with marshes in the background and his prize clipperSemiramisriding, with all sail up, the distant ocean.
Next to him appeared the portrait of old John Pentland’s father—a man of pious expression, dressed all in black, with a high black stock and a wave of luxuriant black hair, the one who had raised the family to really great wealth by contracts for shoes and blankets for the soldiers at Gettysburg and Bull Run and Richmond. After him, gentility had conquered completely, and the Sargent portrait of old John Pentland at middle-age showed a man who was master of hounds and led the life of a country gentleman, a man clearly of power and character, whose strength of feature had turned slowly into the bitter hardness of the old man who sat now in the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or staring before him into space while his son set down the long history of the family.
The gallery was fascinating to strangers, as the visual record of a family which had never lost any money (save for the extravagance of Savina Pentland’s jewels), a family whichhad been the backbone of a community, a family in which the men married wives for thrift and housewifely virtues rather than for beauty, a family solid and respectable and full of honor. It was a tribe magnificent in its virtue and its strength, even at times in its intolerance and hypocrisy. It stood represented now by old John Pentland and Anson, and the boy who lay abovestairs in the room next Olivia’s, dying slowly.
At ten o’clock each night John Pentland bade them good-night and went off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and placing his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia, “I wouldn’t sit up too late, if I were you, when you are so tired,” left them and disappeared. Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and climbed the stairs past all the ancestors.
It was only then, after they had all left her, that a kind of peace settled over Olivia. The burdens lifted, and the cares, the worries, the thoughts that were always troubling her, faded into the distance and for a time she sat leaning back in the winged armchair with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the night—the faint murmur of the breeze in the faded lilacs outside the window, the creaking that afflicts very old houses in the night, and sometimes the ominous sound of Miss Egan’s step traversing distantly the old north wing. And then one night she heard again the distant sound of Higgins’ voice swearing at the red mare as he made his round of the stables before going to bed.
And after they had all gone she opened her book and fell to reading, “Madame de Clèves ne répondit rien, et elle pensoit avec honte qu’elle auroit pris tout ce que l’on disoit du changement de ce prince pour des marques de sa passion, si elle n’avoit point été détrompée. Elle se sentoit quelqueaigreur contre Madame la Dauphine....” This was a world in which she felt somehow strangely at peace, as if she had once lived in it and returned in the silence of the night.
At midnight she closed the book, and making a round of the lower rooms, put out the lights and went up to the long stairway to listen at the doorway of her son’s room for the weak, uncertain sound of his breathing.
Oliviawas right in her belief that Anson was ashamed of his behavior on the night of the ball. It was not that he made an apology or even mentioned the affair. He simply never spoke of it again. For weeks after the scene he did not mention the name of O’Hara, perhaps because the name brought up inevitably the memory of his sudden, insulting speech; but his sense of shame prevented him from harassing her on the subject. What he never knew was that Olivia, while hating him for the insult aimed at her father, was also pleased in a perverse, feminine way because he had displayed for a moment a sudden fit of genuine anger. For a moment he had come very near to being a husband who might interest his wife.
But in the end he only sank back again into a sea of indifference so profound that even Aunt Cassie’s campaign of insinuations and veiled proposals could not stir him into action. The old woman managed to see him alone once or twice, saying to him, “Anson, your father is growing old and can’t manage everything much longer. You must begin to take a stand yourself. The family can’t rest on the shoulders of a woman. Besides, Olivia is an outsider, really. She’s never understood our world.” And then, shaking her head sadly, she would murmur, “There’ll be trouble, Anson, when your father dies, if you don’t show some backbone. You’ll have trouble with Sybil, she’s very queer and pig-headed in her quiet way, just as Olivia was in the matter of sending her to school in Paris.”
And after a pause, “I am the last person in the world to interfere; it’s only for your own good and Olivia’s and all the family’s.”
And Anson, to be rid of her, would make promises, facing her with averted eyes in some corner of the garden or the old house where she had skilfully run him to earth beyond the possibility of escape. And he would leave her, troubled and disturbed because the world and this family which had been saddled unwillingly upon him, would permit him no peace to go on with his writing. He really hated Aunt Cassie because she had never given him any peace, never since the days when she had kept him in the velvet trousers and Fauntleroy curls which spurred the jeers of the plain, red-haired little Sabine. She had never ceased to reproach him for “not being a man and standing up for his rights.” It seemed to him that Aunt Cassie was always hovering near, like a dark persistent fury, always harassing him; and yet he knew, more by instinct than by any process of reasoning, that she was his ally against the others, even his own wife and father and children. He and Aunt Cassie prayed to the same gods.
So he did nothing, and Olivia, keeping her word, spoke of O’Hara to Sybil one day as they sat alone at breakfast.
The girl had been riding with him that very morning and she sat in her riding-clothes, her face flushed by the early morning exercise, telling her mother of the beauties of the country back of Durham, of the new beagle puppies, and of the death of “Hardhead” Smith, who was the last farmer of old New England blood in the county. His half-wittedson, she said, was being taken away to an asylum. O’Hara, she said, was buying his little stony patch of ground.
When she had finished, her mother said, “And O’Hara? You like him, don’t you?”
Sybil had a way of looking piercingly at a person, as if her violet eyes tried to bore quite through all pretense and unveil the truth. She had a power of honesty and simplicity that was completely disarming, and she used it now, smiling at her mother, candidly.
“Yes, I like him very much.... But ... but....” She laughed softly. “Are you worrying about my marrying him, my falling in love—because you needn’t. I am fond of him because he’s the one person around here who likes the things I like. He loves riding in the early morning when the dew is still on the grass and he likes racing with me across the lower meadow by the gravel-pit, and well—he’s an interesting man. When he talks, he makes sense. But don’t worry; I shan’t marry him.”
“Iwasinterested,” said Olivia, “because you do see him more than any one about here.”
Again Sybil laughed. “But he’s old, Mama. He’s more than thirty-five. He’s middle-aged. I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly. He’s going to be my own age.”
“One can’t always tell. It’s not so easy as that.”
“I’m sure I can tell.” Her face took on an expression of gravity. “I’ve devoted a good deal of thought to it and I’ve watched a great many others.”
Olivia wanted to smile, but she knew she dared not if she were to keep her hold upon confidences so charming and naïve.
“And I’m sure that I’ll know the man when I see him, right away, at once. It’ll be like a spark, like my friendship with O’Hara, only deeper than that.”
“Did you ever talk to Thérèse about love?” asked Olivia.
“No; you can’t talk to her about such things. She wouldn’t understand. With Thérèse everything is scientific, biological. When Thérèse marries, I think it will be some man she has picked out as the proper father, scientifically, for her children.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“She might just have children by him without marrying him, the way she breeds frogs. I think that’s horrible.”
Again Olivia was seized with an irresistible impulse to laugh, and controlled herself heroically. She kept thinking of how silly, how ignorant, she had been at Sybil’s age, silly and ignorant despite the unclean sort of sophistication she had picked up in the corridors of Continental hotels. She kept thinking how much better a chance Sybil had for happiness.... Sybil, sitting there gravely, defending her warm ideas of romance against the scientific onslaughts of the swarthy, passionate Thérèse.
“It will be some one like O’Hara,” continued Sybil. “Some one who is very much alive—only not middle-aged like O’Hara.”
(So Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged, and he was four years younger than Olivia, who felt and looked so young. The girl kept talking of O’Hara as if his life were over; but that perhaps was only because she herself was so young.)
Olivia sighed now, despite herself. “You mustn’t expect too much from the world, Sybil. Nothing is perfect, not even marriage. One always has to make compromises.”
“Oh, I know that; I’ve thought a great deal about it. All the same, I’m sure I’ll know the man when I see him.” She leaned forward and said earnestly, “Couldn’t you tell when you were a girl?”
“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “I could tell.”
And then, inevitably, Sybil asked what Olivia kept praying she would not ask. She could hear the girl asking it before the words were spoken. She knew exactly what she would say.
“Didn’t you know at once when you met Father?”
And in spite of every effort, the faint echo of a sigh escaped Olivia. “Yes, I knew.”
She saw Sybil give her one of those quick, piercing looks of inquiry and then bow her head abruptly, as if pretending to study the pattern on her plate.
When she spoke again, she changed the subject abruptly, so that Olivia knew she suspected the truth, a thing which she had guarded with a fierce secrecy for so long.
“Why don’t you take up riding again, Mother?” she asked. “I’d love to have you go with me. We would go with O’Hara in the mornings, and then Aunt Cassie couldn’t have anything to say about my getting involved with him.” She looked up. “You’d like him. You couldn’t help it.”
She saw that Sybil was trying to help her in some way, to divert her and drive away the unhappiness.
“I like him already,” said Olivia, “very much.”
Then she rose, saying, “I promised Sabine to motor into Boston with her to-day. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
She went quickly away because she knew it was perilous to sit there any longer talking of such things while Sybil watched her, eager with the freshness of youth which has all life before it.
Out of all their talk two things remained distinct in her mind: one that Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged—almost an old man, for whom there was no longer any chance of romance; the other the immense possibility for tragedy that lay before a girl who was so certain that love would be a glorious romantic affair, so certain of the ideal man whom she would find one day. What was she to do with Sybil? Where was she to find that man? And when she foundhim, what difficulties would she have to face with John Pentland and Anson and Aunt Cassie and the host of cousins and connections who would be marshaled to defeat her?
For she saw clearly enough that this youth for whom Sybil was waiting would never be their idea of a proper match. It would be a man with qualities which O’Hara possessed, and even Higgins, the groom. She saw perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders; she had come to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked, and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat. They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings. O’Hara, with his career and his energy, and Higgins, with his rabbitlike love-affairs and his nearness to all that was earthy, still carried about them a sense of the great zest in life. They reached down somehow into the roots of things where there was still savor and fertility.
And as she walked along the hallway, she found herself laughing aloud over the titles of the only three books which the Pentland family had ever produced—“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” and Mr. Struthers’ two books, “Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards.” She thought suddenly of what Sabine had once said acidly of New England—that it was a place where thoughts were likely to grow “higher and fewer.”
But she was frightened, too, because in the life of enchantment which surrounded her, the virtues of O’Hara and Higgins seemed to her the only things in the world worth possessing. She wanted desperately to be alive, as she had never been, and she knew that this, too, was what Sybil sought inall her groping, half-blind romantic youth. It was something which the girl sensed and had never clearly understood, something which she knew existed and was awaiting her.
Sabine, watching O’Hara as he crossed the fields through the twilight, had penetrated in a sudden flash of intuition the depths of his character. His profound loneliness was, perhaps, the key which unlocked the whole of his soul, a key which Sabine knew well enough, for there had never been a time in all her existence, save for a sudden passionate moment or two in the course of her life with Callendar, when she was free of a painful feeling that she was alone. Even with her own daughter, the odd Thérèse, she was lonely. Watching life with the same passionate intensity with which she had watched the distant figure of O’Hara moving away against the horizon, she had come long ago to understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity. Looking about her she saw that old John Pentland was lonely, and Olivia, and even her own daughter Thérèse, rambling off independently across the marshes in search of bugs and queer plants. She saw that Anson Pentland was never lonely, for he had his friends who were so like him as to be very nearly indistinguishable, and he had all the traditions and fetishes which he shared with Aunt Cassie. They were part of a fabric, a small corner in the whole tapestry of life, from which they were inseparable.
Of them all, it seemed to her, as she came to see more and more of O’Hara, that he was the most lonely. He had friends, scores, even hundreds of them, in a dozen circles, ranging from the docks where he had spent his boyhood to the world about Durham where there were others who treatedhim less coldly than the Pentland family had done. He had friends because there was a quality about him which was irresistible. It lurked somewhere in the depths of the humorous blue eyes and at the corners of the full, rather sensual mouth—a kind of universal sympathy which made him understand the fears, the hopes, the ambitions, the weaknesses of other people. It was that quality, so invaluable in politics, which led enemies unjustly to call him all things to all people. He must have had the gift of friendship, for there were whole sections of Boston which would have followed him anywhere; and yet behind these easy, warm ties there was always a sort of veil shutting him away from them. He had a way of being at home in a barroom or at a hunt breakfast with equal ease, but there was a part of him—the part which was really O’Hara—which the world never saw at all, a strangely warm, romantic, impractical, passionate, headlong, rather unscrupulous Irishman, who lay shut away where none could penetrate. Sabine knew this O’Hara; he had been revealed to her swiftly in a sudden flash at the mention of Olivia Pentland. And afterward when she thought of it, she (Sabine Callendar), who was so hard, so bitter, so unbelieving, surrendered to him as so many had done before her.
Standing there in her sitting-room, so big and powerful and self-reliant, he had seemed suddenly like a little boy, like the little boy whom she had found once late at night long ago, sitting alone and quite still on the curb in front of her house in the Rue de Tilsitt. She had stopped for a moment and watched him, and presently she had approached and asked, “What are you doing here on the curb at this hour of the night?” And the little boy, looking up, had said gravely, “I’m playing.”
It had happened years ago—the little boy must have grown into a young man by now—but she remembered him suddenlyduring the moment when O’Hara had turned and said to her, “It will mean a great deal to me, more than you can imagine.”
O’Hara was like that, she knew—sad and a little lonely, as if in the midst of all his success, with his career and his big new house and his dogs and horses and all the other shiny accoutrements of a gentleman, he had looked up at her and said gravely, “I’m playing.”
Long ago Sabine had come to understand that one got a savor out of life by casting overboard all the little rules which clutter up existence, all the ties, and beliefs and traditions in which she had been given a training so intense and severe that in the end she had turned a rebel. Behind all the indifference of countenance and the intricacy of brain, there lay a foundation of immense candor which had driven her to seek her companions, with the directness of an arrow, only among the persons whom she had come to designate as “complete.” It was a label which she did not trouble to define to any one, doubting perhaps that any one save herself would find any interest in it; even for herself, it was a label lacking in definiteness. Vaguely she meant by “complete” the persons who stood on their own, who had an existence sufficiently strong to survive the assault or the collapse of any environment, persons who might exist independent of any concrete world, who possessed a proud sense of individuality, who might take root and work out a successful destiny wherever fate chanced to drop them. They were rare, she had come to discover, and yet they existed everywhere, such persons as John Pentland and O’Hara, Olivia and Higgins.
So she had come to seek her life among them, drawing them quietly about her wherever in the world she happened to pause for a time. She did it quietly and without loud cries of “Freedom” and “Free Love” and “The Right to Lead One’s Life,” for she was enough civilized to understandthe absurdity of making a spectacle in the market-place, and she was too intense an individualist ever to turn missionary. Here perhaps lay her quiet strength and the source of that vague distrust and uneasiness which her presence created in people like Anson and Aunt Cassie. It was unbearable for Aunt Cassie to suspect that Sabine really did not trouble even to scorn her, unbearable to an old woman who had spent all her life in arranging the lives of others to find that a chit of a woman like Sabine could discover in her only a subject of mingled mirth and pity. It was unbearable not to have the power of jolting Sabine out of her serene and insolent indifference, unbearable to know that she was always watching you out of those green eyes, turning you over and over as if you were a bug and finding you in the end an inferior sort of insect. Those who had shared the discovery of her secret were fond of her, and those who had not were bitter against her. And it was, after all, a very simple secret, that one has only to be simple and friendly and human and “complete.” She had no patience with sentimentality, and affectation and false piety.
And so the presence of Sabine began slowly to create a vaguely defined rift in a world hitherto set and complacent and even proud of itself. Something in the sight of her cold green eyes, in the sound of her metallic voice, in the sudden shrewd, disillusioning observations which she had a way of making at disconcerting moments, filled people like Aunt Cassie with uneasiness and people like Olivia with a smoldering sense of restlessness and rebellion. Olivia herself became more and more conscious of the difference with the passing of each day into the next and there were times when she suspected that that fierce old man, her father-in-law, was aware of it. It was potent because Sabine was no outsider; the mockery of an outsider would have slipped off the back of the Durham world like arrows off the back of an armadillo. But Sabine was one of them: it was that which made the difference: she was always inside the shell.
Onehot, breathless night in June Sabine overcame her sense of bored indolence enough to give a dinner at Brook Cottage—a dinner well served, with delicious food, which it might have been said she flung at her guests with a superb air of indifference from the seat at the head of the table, where she sat painted, ugly and magnificently dressed, watching them all in a perverse sort of pleasure. It was a failure as an entertainment, for it had been years since Sabine had given a dinner where the guests were not clever enough to entertain themselves, and now that she was back again in a world where people were invited for every sort of reason save that you really wanted their company, she declined to make any effort. It was a failure, too, because Thérèse, for whom it was given, behaved exactly as she had behaved on the night of the ball. There was an uneasiness and a strain, a sense of awkwardness among the callow young men and a sense of weariness in Sabine and Olivia. O’Hara was there, for Sabine had kept her half-promise; but even he sat quietly, all his boldness and dash vanished before a boyish shyness. The whole affair seemed to be drowned in the lassitude, the enchantment that enveloped the old house on the other bank of the river.
Olivia had come, almost against her will, reduced to a state of exhaustion after a long call from Aunt Cassie on the subject of the rumored affair between Sybil and their Irish neighbor. And when they rose, she slipped quietly away into the garden, because she could not bear the thought of making strained and artificial conversation. She wanted, horribly, to be left in peace.
It was a superb night—hot, as a summer night should be—but clear, too, so that the whole sky was like a sapphire dome studded with diamonds. At the front of the cottage, beyond the borders of the little terraced garden, the marshes spread their dark carpet toward the distant dunes, which with the descent of darkness had turned dim and blue against the purer white of the line made by the foaming surf. The feel of the damp thick grass against the sole of her silver slippers led her to stop for a moment, breathing deeply, and filled her with a mild, half-mystical desire to blend herself into all the beauty that surrounded her, into the hot richness of the air, the scents of the opening blossoms and of pushing green stems, into the grass and the sea and the rich-smelling marshes, to slip away into a state which was nothing and yet everything, to float into eternity. She had abruptly an odd, confused sense of the timelessness of all these forces and sensations, of the sea and the marshes, the pushing green Stems and the sapphire dome powdered with diamonds above her head. She saw for the first time in all her existence the power of something which went on and on, ignoring pitiful small creatures like herself and all those others in the cottage behind her, a power which ignored cities and armies and nations, which would go on and on long after the grass had blanketed the ruins of the old house at Pentland. It was sweeping past her, leaving her stranded somewhere in the dull backwaters. She wanted suddenly, fiercely, to take part in all the great spectacle of eternal fertility, a mystery which was stronger than any of them or all of them together, a force which in the end would crush all their transient little prides and beliefs and traditions.
And then she thought, as if she were conscious of it for the first time, “I am tired, tired to death, and a little mad.”
Moving across the damp grass she seated herself on a stone bench which O’Hara had placed beneath one of the ancientapple-trees left standing from the orchard which had covered all the land about Brook Cottage in the days when Savina Pentland was still alive; and for a long time (she never knew how long) she remained there lost in one of those strange lapses of consciousness when one is neither awake nor asleep but in the vague borderland where there is no thought, no care, no troubles. And then slowly she became aware of some one standing there quite near her, beneath the ancient, gnarled tree. As if the presence were materialized somehow out of a dream, she noticed first the faint, insinuating masculine odor of cigar-smoke blending itself with the scent of the growing flowers in Sabine’s garden, and then turning she saw a black figure which she recognized at once as that of O’Hara. There was no surprise in the sight of him; it seemed in a queer way as if she had been expecting him.
As she turned, he moved toward her and spoke. “Our garden has flourished, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You’d never think it was only a year old.”
“Yes,” she said. “It has flourished marvelously.” And then, after a little pause, “How long have you been standing there?”
“Only a moment. I saw you come out of the house.” They listened for a time to the distant melancholy pounding of the surf, and presently he said softly, with a kind of awe in his voice: “It is a marvelous night ... a night full of splendor.”
She made an effort to answer him, but somehow she could think of nothing to say. The remark, uttered so quietly, astonished her, because she had never thought of O’Hara as one who would be sensitive to the beauty of a night. It was too dark to distinguish his face, but she kept seeing him as she remembered him, seeing him, too, as the others thought of him—rough and vigorous but a little common, with thescar on his temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: “It is a night full of splendor.” The men she knew—Anson’s friends—never said such things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done anything so unusual.
“The party is not a great success,” he was saying.
“No.”
“No one seems to be getting on with any one else. Mrs. Callendar ought not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that.”
Olivia laughed softly. “She may have done it on purpose. You can never tell why she does anything.”
For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he said, “You aren’t cold out here?”
“No, not on a night like this.”
There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.
“I keep wondering,” she said, “how long it will be until the bungalows of Durham creep down and cover all this land.”
“They won’t, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea.”
In the darkness she smiled at the thought of an Irish Roman Catholic politician as the protector of this old New England countryside, and aloud she said, “You’re growing to be like all the others. You want to make the world stand still.”
“Yes, I can see that it must seem funny to you.” Therewas no bitterness in his voice, but only a sort of hurt, which again astonished her, because it was impassible to think of O’Hara as one who could be hurt.
“There will always be the Pentland house, but, of course, all of us will die some day and then what?”
“There will always be our children.”
She was aware slowly of slipping back into that world of cares and troubles behind her from which she had escaped a little while before. She said, “Youare looking a long way into the future.”
“Perhaps, but I mean to have children one day. And at Pentlands there is always Sybil, who will fight for it fiercely. She’ll never give it up.”