And seeing her smile, he began to talk, telling her, as they rode toward the rising sun, the story of his humble origin and of those early bitter days along India Wharf, and from time to time she said, “I understand. My own childhood wasn’t happy,” or, “Go on, please. It fascinates me ... more than you can imagine.”
So he went on, telling her the story of the long scar on his temple, telling her as he had known he would, of his climb to success, confessing everything, even the things of which he had come to be a little ashamed, and betraying from time to time the bitterness which afflicts those who have made their own way against great odds. The shrewd, complex man became as naïve as a little boy; and she understood, as he had known she would. It was miraculous how right he had been about her.
Lost in this mood, they rode on and on as the day rose and grew warm, enveloped all the while in the odor of the dark, rich, growing thicket and the acrid smell of the tall marshferns, until Olivia, glancing at her watch, said, “It is verylate. I shall have missed the family breakfast.” She meant really that Anson would have gone up to Boston by now and that she was glad—only it was impossible to say a thing like that.
At the gravel-pit, she bade him good-by, and turning her mare toward Pentlands she felt the curious effect of his nearness slipping away from her with each new step; it was as if the hot August morning were turning cold. And when she came in sight of the big red brick house sitting so solidly among the ancient elms, she thought, “I must never do this again. I have been foolish.” And again, “Why should I not do it? Why should I not be happy? They have no right to any claim upon me.”
But there was one claim, she knew; there was Sybil. She must not make a fool of herself for the sake of Sybil. She must do nothing to interfere with what had been taking place this very morning in the small fishing-boat far out beyond the marshes somewhere near the spot where Savina Pentland had been drowned. She knew well enough why Sybil had chosen to go fishing instead of riding; it was so easy to look at the girl and at young de Cyon and know what was happening there. She herself had no right to stand in the way of this other thing which was so much younger and fresher, so much more nearly perfect.
As she put her mare over the low wall by the stables she looked up and chanced to see a familiar figure in rusty black standing in the garden, as if she had been there all the while looking out over the meadows, watching them. As she drew near, Aunt Cassie came forward with an expression of anxiety on her face, saying in a thin, hushed voice, as if she might be overheard, “I thought you’d never come back, Olivia dear. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Aware from the intense air of mystery that some new calamity had occurred, Olivia replied, “I was riding with O’Hara. We went too far and it was too hot to hurry the horses.”
“I know,” said Aunt Cassie. “I saw you.” (“Of course she would,” thought Olivia. “Does anything ever escape her?”) “It’s abouther. She’s been violent again this morning and Miss Egan says you may be able to do something. She keeps raving about something to do with the attic and Sabine.”
“Yes, I know what it is. I’ll go right up.”
Higgins appeared, grinning and with a bright birdlike look in his sharp eyes, as if he knew all that had been happening and wanted to say, “Ah, you were out with O’Hara this morning ... alone.... Well, you can’t do better, Ma’am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man like that.”
As he took the bridle, he said, “That’s a fine animal Mr. O’Hara rides, Ma’am. I wish we had him in our stables....”
She murmured something in reply and without even waiting for coffee hastened up the dark stairs to the north wing. On the way past the row of tall deep-set windows she caught a swift glimpse of Sabine, superbly dressed and holding a bright yellow parasol over her head, moving indolently up the long drive toward the house, and again she had a sudden unaccountable sense of something melancholy, perhaps even tragic, a little way off. It was one of those quick, inexplicable waves of depression that sweeps over one like a shadow. She said to herself, “I’m depressed now because an hour ago I was too happy.”
And immediately she thought, “But it was like Aunt Cassie to have such a thought as that. I must take care or I’ll begetting to be a true Pentland ... believing that if I’m happy a calamity is soon to follow.”
She had moments of late when it seemed to her that something in the air, some power hidden in the old house itself, was changing her slowly, imperceptibly, in spite of herself.
Miss Egan met her outside the door, with the fixed eternal smile which to-day seemed to Olivia the sort of smile that the countenance of Fate itself might wear.
“The old lady is more quiet,” she said. “Higgins helped me and we managed to bind her in the bed so that she couldn’t harm herself. It’s surprising how much strength she has in her poor thin body.” She explained that old Mrs. Pentland kept screaming, “Sabine! Sabine!” for Mrs. Callendar and that she kept insisting on being allowed to go into the attic.
“It’s the old idea that she’s lost something up there,” said Miss Egan. “But it’s probably only something she’s imagined.” Olivia was silent for a moment. “I’ll go and search,” she said. “It might be there is something and if I could find it, it would put an end to these spells.”
She found them easily, almost at once, now that there was daylight streaming in at the windows of the cavernous attic. They lay stuffed away beneath one of the great beams ... a small bundle of ancient yellowed letters which had been once tied together with a bit of mauve ribbon since torn in haste by some one who thrust them in this place of concealment. They had been opened carelessly and in haste, for the moldering paper was all cracked and torn along the edges. The ink, violet once, had turned to a dirty shade of brown.
Standing among the scattered toys left by Jack and Sybilthe last time they had played house, Olivia held the letters one by one up to the light. There were eleven in all and each one was addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, at Pentlands. Eight of them had been sent through the Boston post-office and the other three bore no stamps of any kind, as if they had been sent by messengers or in a bouquet or between the leaves of a book. The handwriting was that of a man, large, impetuous, sprawling, which showed a tendency to blur the letters together in a headlong, impatient way.
She thought at once, “They are addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, which means Mrs. Jared Pentland. Anson will be delighted, for these must be the letters which passed between Savina Pentland and her cousin, Toby Cane. Anson needed them to complete the book.”
And then it occurred to her that there was something strange about the letters—in their having been hidden and perhaps found by the old lady belowstairs and then hidden away a second time. Old Mrs. Pentland must have found them there nearly forty years ago, when they still allowed her to wander about the house. Perhaps it had been on one of those rainy days when Anson and Sabine had come into the attic to play in this very corner with these same old toys—the days when Sabine refused to pretend that muddy water was claret. And now the old lady was remembering the discovery after all these years because the return of Sabine and the sound of her name had lighted some train of long-forgotten memories.
Seating herself on a broken, battered old trunk, she opened the first of the letters reverently so as not to dislodge the bits of violet sealing-wax that still clung to the edges, and almost at once she read with a swift sense of shock:
Carissima,I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and whenyou didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you....
Carissima,
I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and whenyou didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you....
She stopped reading. She understood it now.... The scamp Toby Cane had been more than merely a cousin to Savina Pentland; he had been her lover and that was why she had hidden the letters away beneath the beams of the vast unfinished attic, intending perhaps to destroy them one day. And then she had been drowned before there was time and the letters lay in their hiding-place until John Pentland’s wife had discovered them one day by chance, only to hide them again, forgetting in the poor shocked mazes of her mind what they were or where they were hidden. They were the letters which Anson had been searching for.
But she saw at once that Anson would never use the letters in his book, for he would never bring into the open a scandal in the Pentland family, even though it was a scandal which had come to an end, tragically, nearly a century earlier and was now almost pure romance. She saw, of course, that a love affair between so radiant a creature as Savina Pentland and a scamp like Toby Cane would seem rather odd in a book called “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” Perhaps it was better not to speak of the letters at all. Anson would manage somehow to destroy all the value there was in them; he would sacrifice truth to the gods of Respectability and Pretense.
Thrusting the letters into her pocket, she descended the dark stairway, and in the north wing Miss Egan met her to ask, almost with an air of impatience, “I suppose you didn’t find anything?”
“No,” said Olivia quickly, “nothing which could possibly have interested her.”
“It’s some queer idea she’s hatched up,” replied Miss Egan,and looked at Olivia as if she doubted the truth of what she had said.
She did not go downstairs at once. Instead, she went to her own room and after bathing, seated herself in the chaise longue by the open window above the terrace, prepared to read the letters one by one. From below there arose a murmur of voices, one metallic and hard, the other nervous, thin, and high-pitched—Sabine’s and Aunt Cassie’s—as they sat on the terrace in acid conversation, each trying to outstay the other. Listening, Olivia decided that she was a little weary of them both this morning; it was the first time it had ever occurred to her that in a strange way there was a likeness between two women who seemed so different. That curious pair, who hated each other so heartily, had the same way of trying to pry into her life.
None of the letters bore any dates, so she fell to reading them in the order in which they had been found, beginning with the one which read:
Carissima,I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you....
Carissima,
I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you....
She read on:
It’s the thought of his being there beside you, even taking possession of you sometimes, that I can’t bear. I see him sitting there in the drawing-room, looking at you—eating you with his eyes and pretending all the while that he is above the lusts of the flesh. The flesh! The flesh! You and I,dearest, know the glories of the flesh. Sometimes I think I’m a coward not to kill him at once.For God’s sake, get rid of him somehow to-night. I can’t pass another evening alone in the dark gloomy cottage waiting in vain. It is more than I can bear to sit there knowing that every minute, every second, may bring the sound of your step. Be merciful to me. Get rid of him somehow.I have not touched a drop of anything since I last saw you. Are you satisfied with that?I am sending this in a book by black Hannah. She will wait for an answer.
It’s the thought of his being there beside you, even taking possession of you sometimes, that I can’t bear. I see him sitting there in the drawing-room, looking at you—eating you with his eyes and pretending all the while that he is above the lusts of the flesh. The flesh! The flesh! You and I,dearest, know the glories of the flesh. Sometimes I think I’m a coward not to kill him at once.
For God’s sake, get rid of him somehow to-night. I can’t pass another evening alone in the dark gloomy cottage waiting in vain. It is more than I can bear to sit there knowing that every minute, every second, may bring the sound of your step. Be merciful to me. Get rid of him somehow.
I have not touched a drop of anything since I last saw you. Are you satisfied with that?
I am sending this in a book by black Hannah. She will wait for an answer.
Slowly, as she read on and on through the mazes of the impetuous, passionate writing, the voices from the terrace below, the one raised now and a little angry, the other still metallic, hard and indifferent, grew more and more distant until presently she did not hear them at all and in the place of the sound her senses received another impression—that of a curious physical glow, stealing slowly through her whole body. It was as if there lay in that faded brown writing a smoldering fire that had never wholly died out and would never be extinguished until the letters themselves had been burned into ashes.
Word by word, line by line, page by page, the whole tragic, passionate legend came to recreate itself, until near the end she was able to see the three principal actors in it with the reality of life, as if they had never died at all but had gone on living in this old house, perhaps in this very room where she sat ... the very room which once must have belonged to Savina Pentland.
She saw the husband, that Jared Pentland of whom no portrait existed because he would never spend money on such a luxury, as he must have been in life—a sly man, shrewd and pious and avaricious save when the strange dark passion forhis wife made of him an unbalanced creature. And Savina Pentland herself was there, as she looked out of the Ingres portrait—dark, voluptuous, reckless, with her bad enticing eyes—a woman who might easily be the ruin of a man like Jared Pentland. And somehow she was able to get a clear and vivid picture of the writer of those smoldering letters—a handsome scamp of a lover, dark like his cousin Savina, and given to drinking and gambling. But most of all she was aware of that direct, unashamed and burning passion that never had its roots in this stony New England soil beyond the windows of Pentlands. A man who frankly glorified the flesh! A waster! A seducer! And yet a man capable of this magnificent fire which leaped up from the yellow pages and warmed her through and through. It occurred to her then for the first time that there was something heroic and noble and beautiful in a passion so intense. For a moment she was even seized by the feeling that reading these letters was a kind of desecration.
They revealed, too, how Jared Pentland had looked upon his beautiful wife as a fine piece of property, an investment which gave him a sensual satisfaction and also glorified his house and dinner-table. (What Sabine called the “lower middle-class sense of property.”) He must have loved her and hated her at once, in the way Higgins loved and hated the handsome red mare. He must have been proud of her and yet hated her because she possessed so completely the power of making a fool of him. The whole story moved against a background of family ... the Pentland family. There were constant references to cousins and uncles and aunts and their suspicions and interference.
“It must have begun,” thought Olivia, “even in those days.”
Out of the letters she learned that the passion had begun in Rome when Savina Pentland was sitting for her portraitby Ingres. Toby Cane had been there with her and afterwards she had gone with him to his lodgings; and when they had returned to the house at Durham (almost new then and the biggest country seat in all New England) they had met in the cottage—Brook Cottage, which still stood there within sight of Olivia’s window—Brook Cottage, which after the drowning had been bought by Sabine’s grandfather and then fallen into ruins and been restored again by the too-bright, vulgar, resplendent touch of O’Hara. It was an immensely complicated and intricate story which went back, back into the past and seemed to touch them all here in Durham.
“The roots of life at Pentlands,” thought Olivia, “go down, down into the past. There are no new branches, no young, vigorous shoots.”
She came at length to the last of the letters, which had buried in its midst the terrible revealing lines—
If you knew what delight it gives me to have you write that the child is ours beyond any doubt, that there cannot be the slightest doubt of it! The baby belongs to us ... to us alone! It has nothing to do with him. I could not bear the idea of his thinking that the child is his if it was not that it makes your position secure. The thought tortures me but I am able to bear it because it leaves you safe and above suspicion.
If you knew what delight it gives me to have you write that the child is ours beyond any doubt, that there cannot be the slightest doubt of it! The baby belongs to us ... to us alone! It has nothing to do with him. I could not bear the idea of his thinking that the child is his if it was not that it makes your position secure. The thought tortures me but I am able to bear it because it leaves you safe and above suspicion.
Slowly, thoughtfully, as if unable to believe her eyes, she reread the lines through again, and then placed her hands against her head with a gesture of feeling suddenly weak and out of her mind.
She tried to think clearly. “Savina Pentland never had but one child, so far as I know ... never but one. And that must have been Toby Cane’s child.”
There could be no doubt. It was all there, in writing.The child was the child of Toby Cane and a woman who was born Savina Dalgedo. He was not a Pentland and none of his descendants had been Pentlands ... not one.
They were not Pentlands at all save as the descendants of Savina and her lover had married among the Brahmins where Pentland blood was in every family. They were not Pentlands by blood and yet they were Pentlands beyond any question, in conduct, in point of view, in tradition. It occurred to Olivia for the first time how immense and terrible a thing was that environment, that air which held them all enchanted ... all the cloud of prejudices and traditions and prides and small anxieties. It was a world so set, so powerful, so iron-bound that it had made Pentlands of people like Anson and Aunt Cassia, even like her father-in-law. It made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at all. She saw it now as an overwhelming, terrifying power that was a part of the old house. It stood rooted in the very soil of all the landscape that spread itself beyond her windows.
And in the midst of this realization she had a swift impulse to laugh, hysterically, for the picture of Anson had come to her suddenly ... Anson pouring his whole soul into that immense glorification to be known as “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”
Slowly, as the first shock melted away a little, she began to believe that the yellowed bits of paper were a sort of infernal machine, an instrument with the power of shattering a whole world. What was she to do with this thing—this curious symbol of a power that always won every struggle in one way or another, directly as in the case of Savina and her lover, or by taking its vengeance upon body or soul as it had done in the case of Aunt Cassie’s poor, prying, scheming mind? And there was, too, the dark story of Horace Pentland, and the madness of the old woman in the north wing, and even those sudden terrible bouts of drinking which madeso fine a man as John Pentland into something very near to a beast.
It was as if a light of blinding clarity had been turned upon all the long procession of ancestors. She saw now that if “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” was to have any value at all as truth it must be rewritten in the light of the struggle between the forces glorified by that drunken scamp Toby Cane and this other terrible force which seemed to be all about her everywhere, pressing even herself slowly into its own mold. It was an old struggle between those who chose to find their pleasure in this world and those who looked for the vague promise of a glorified future existence.
She could see Anson writing in his book, “In the present generation (192-) there exists Cassandra Pentland Struthers (Mrs. Edward Cane Struthers), a widow who has distinguished herself by her devotion to the Episcopal Church and to charity and good works. She resides in winter in Boston and in summer at her country house near Durham on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first Pentland, distinguished founder of the American family.”
Yes, Anson would write just those words in his book. He would describe thus the old woman who sat belowstairs hoping all the while that Olivia would descend bearing the news of some new tragedy ... that virginal old woman who had ruined the whole life of her husband and kept poor half-witted Miss Peavey a prisoner for nearly thirty years.
The murmur of voices died away presently and Olivia, looking out of the window, saw that it was Aunt Cassie who had won this time. She was standing in the garden looking down the drive with that malignant expression which sometimes appeared on her face in moments when she thoughtherself alone. Far down the shadow-speckled drive, the figure of Sabine moved indolently away in the direction of Brook Cottage. Sabine, too, belonged in a way to the family; she had grown up enveloped in the powerful tradition which made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at all. Perhaps (thought Olivia) the key to Sabine’s restless, unhappy existence also lay in the same dark struggle. Perhaps if one could penetrate deeply enough in the long family history one would find there the reasons for Sabine’s hatred of this Durham world and the reasons why she had returned to a people she disliked with all the bitter, almost fanatic passion of her nature. There was in Sabine an element of cold cruelty.
At the sight of Olivia coming down the steps into the garden, Aunt Cassie turned and moved forward quickly with a look of expectancy, asking, “And how is the poor thing?”
And at Olivia’s answer, “She’s quiet now ... sleeping. It’s all passed,” the looked changed to one of disappointment.
She said, with an abysmal sigh, “Ah, she will go on forever. She’ll be alive long after I’ve gone to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
“Invalids are like that,” replied Olivia, by way of saying something. “They take such care of themselves.” And almost at once, she thought, “Here I am playing the family game, pretending that she’s not mad but only an invalid.”
She had no feeling of resentment against the busy old woman; indeed it seemed to her at times that she had almost an affection for Aunt Cassie—the sort of affection one has for an animal or a bit of furniture which has been about almost as long as one can remember. And at the moment the figure of Aunt Cassie, the distant sight of Sabine, the bright garden full of flowers ... all these things seemed to her melodramatic and unreal, for she was still living inthe Pentlands of Savina and Toby Cane. It was impossible to fix her attention on Aunt Cassie and her flutterings.
The old lady was saying, “You all seem to have grown very fond of this man O’Hara.”
(What was she driving at now?) Aloud, Olivia said, “Why not? He’s agreeable, intelligent ... even distinguished in his way.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I’ve been discussing him with Sabine, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I may have been wrong about him. She thinks him a clever man with a great future.” There was a pause and she added with an air of making a casual observation, “But what about his past? I mean where does he come from.”
“I know all about it. He’s been telling me. That’s why I was late this morning.”
For a time Aunt Cassie was silent, as if weighing some deep problem. At last she said, “I was wondering about seeing too much of him. He has a bad reputation with women.... At least, so I’m told.”
Olivia laughed. “After all, Aunt Cassie, I’m a grown woman. I can look out for myself.”
“Yes.... I know.” She turned with a disarming smile of Christian sweetness. “I don’t want you to think that I’m interfering, Olivia. It’s the last thing I’d think of doing. But I was considering your own good. It’s harmless enough, I’m sure. No one would ever think otherwise, knowing you, my dear. But it’s what people will say. There was a scandal I believe about eight years ago ... a road-house scandal!” She said this with an air of great suffering, as if the words “road-house scandal” seared her lips.
“I suppose so. Most men ... politicians, I mean ... have scandals connected with their names. It’s part of the business, Aunt Cassie.”
And she kept thinking with amazement of the industry ofthe old lady—that she should have taken the trouble of going far back into O’Hara’s past to find some definite thing against him. She did not doubt the ultimate truth of Aunt Cassie’s insinuation. Aunt Cassie did not lie deliberately; there was always a grain of truth in her implications, though sometimes the poor grain lay buried so deeply beneath exaggerations that it was almost impossible to discover it. And a thing like that might easily be true about O’Hara. With a man like him you couldn’t expect women to play the rôle they played with a man like Anson.
“It’s only on account of what people will say,” repeated Aunt Cassie.
“I’ve almost come to the conclusion that what people say doesn’t really matter any longer....”
Aunt Cassie began suddenly to pick a bouquet from the border beside her. “Oh, it’s not you I’m worrying about, Olivia dear. But we have to consider others sometimes.... There’s Sybil and Anson, and even the very name of Pentland. There’s never been any such suspicion attached to it ... ever.”
It was incredible (thought Olivia) that any one would make such a statement, incredible anywhere else in the world. She wanted to ask, “What about your brother and old Mrs. Soames?” And in view of those letters that lay locked in her dressing-table....
At that moment lunch was announced by Peters’ appearance in the doorway. Olivia turned to Aunt Cassie, “You’re staying, of course.”
“No, I must go. You weren’t expecting me.”
So Olivia began the ancient game, played for so many years, of pressing Aunt Cassie to stay to lunch.
“It makes no difference,” she said, “only another plate.” And so on through a whole list of arguments that she had memorized long ago. And at last Aunt Cassie, with the airof having been pressed beyond her endurance, yielded, and to Peters, who had also played the game for years, Olivia said, “Lay another place for Mrs. Struthers.”
She had meant to stay all along. Lunching out saved both money and trouble, for Miss Peavey ate no more than a bird, at least not openly; and, besides, there were things she must find out at Pentlands, and other things which she must plan. In truth, wild horses could not have dragged her away.
As they entered the house, Aunt Cassie, carrying the bouquet she had plucked, said casually, “I met the Mannering boy on the road this morning and told him to come in to-night. I thought you wouldn’t mind. He’s very fond of Sybil, you know.”
“No, of course not,” replied Olivia. “I don’t mind. But I’m afraid Sybil isn’t very interested in him.”
Thedeath of Horace Pentland was not an event to be kept quiet by so simple a means as a funeral that was almost secret; news of it leaked out and was carried here and there by ladies eager to rake up an old Pentland scandal in vengeance upon Aunt Cassie, the community’s principal disseminator of calamities. It even penetrated at last the offices of theTranscript, which sent a request for an obituary of the dead man, for he was, after all, a member of one of Boston’s proudest families. And then, without warning, the ghost of Horace Pentland reappeared suddenly in the most disconcerting of all quarters—Brook Cottage.
The ghost accompanied Sabine up the long drive one hot morning while Olivia sat listening to Aunt Cassie. Olivia noticed that Sabine approached them with an unaccustomed briskness, that all trace of the familiar indolence had vanished. As she reached the edge of the terrace, she called out with a bright look in her eyes, “I have news ... of Cousin Horace.”
She was enjoying the moment keenly, and the sight of her enjoyment must have filled Aunt Cassie, who knew her so well, with uneasiness. She took her own time about revealing the news, inquiring first after Aunt Cassie’s health, and settling herself comfortably in one of the wicker chairs. She was an artist in the business of tormenting the old lady and she waited now to squeeze every drop of effect out ofher announcement. She was not to be hurried even by the expression which Aunt Cassie’s face inevitably assumed at the mention of Horace Pentland—the expression of one who finds himself in the vicinity of a bad smell and is unable to escape.
At last, after lighting a cigarette and moving her chair out of the sun, Sabine announced in a flat voice, “Cousin Horace has left everything he possesses to me.”
A look of passionate relief swept Aunt Cassie’s face, a look which said, “Pooh! Pooh! Is that all?” She laughed—it was almost a titter, colored by mockery—and said, “Is that all? I imagine it doesn’t make you a great heiress.”
(“Aunt Cassie,” thought Olivia, “ought not to have given Sabine such an opportunity; she has said just what Sabine wanted her to say.”)
Sabine answered her: “But you’re wrong there, Aunt Cassie. It’s not money that he’s left, but furniture ... furniture and bibelots ... and it’s a wonderful collection. I’ve seen it myself when I visited him at Mentone.”
“You ought never to have gone.... You certainly have lost all moral sense, Sabine. You’ve forgotten all that I taught you as a little girl.”
Sabine ignored her. “You see, he worshiped such things, and he spent twenty years of his life collecting them.”
“It seems improbable that they could be worth much ... with as little money as Horace Pentland had ... only what we let him have to live on.”
Sabine smiled again, sardonically, perhaps because the tilt with Aunt Cassie proved so successful. “You’re wrong again, Aunt Cassie.... They’re worth a great deal ... far more than he paid for them, because there are things in his collection which you couldn’t buy elsewhere for any amount of money. He took to trading pieces off until his collection became nearly perfect.” She paused for a moment, allowingthe knife to rest in the wound. “It’s an immensely valuable collection. You see, I know about it because I used to see Cousin Horace every winter when I went to Rome. I knew more about him than any of you. He was a man of perfect taste in such things. He really knew.”
Olivia sat all the while watching the scene with a quiet amusement. The triumph on this occasion was clearly Sabine’s, and Sabine knew it. She sat there enjoying every moment of it, watching Aunt Cassie writhe at the thought of so valuable a heritage going out of the direct family, to so remote and hostile a connection. It was clearly a disaster ranking in importance with the historic loss of Savina Pentland’s parure of pearls and emeralds at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It was property lost forever that should have gone into the family fortune.
Sabine was opening the letter slowly, allowing the paper to crackle ominously, as if she knew that every crackle ran painfully up and down the spine of the old lady.
“It’s the invoice from the Custom House,” she said, lifting each of the five long sheets separately. “Five pages long ... total value perhaps as much as seventy-five thousand dollars.... Of course there’s not even any duty to pay, as they’re all old things.”
Aunt Cassie started, as if seized by a sudden pain, and Sabine continued, “He even left provision for shipping it ... all save four or five big pieces which are being held at Mentone. There are eighteen cases in all.”
She began to read the items one by one ... cabinets, commodes, chairs, lusters, tables, pictures, bits of bronze, crystal and jade ... all the long list of things which Horace Pentland had gathered with the loving care of a connoisseur during the long years of his exile; and in the midst of the reading, Aunt Cassie, unable any longer to control herself, interrupted, saying, “It seems to me he was an ungrateful,disgusting man. It ought to have gone to my dear brother, who supported him all these years. I don’t see why he left it all to a remote cousin like you.”
Sabine delved again into the envelope. “Wait,” she said. “He explains that point himself ... in his own will.” She opened a copy of this document and, searching for a moment, read, “To my cousin, Sabine Callendar (Mrs. Cane Callendar), of—Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France, and Newport, Rhode Island, I leave all my collections of furniture, tapestries, bibelots, etc., in gratitude for her kindness to me over a period of many years and in return for her faith and understanding at a time when the rest of my family treated me as an outcast.”
Aunt Cassie was beside herself. “And how should he have been treated if not as an outcast? He was an ungrateful, horrible wretch! It was Pentland money which supported him all his miserable life.” She paused a moment for breath. “I always told my dear brother that twenty-five hundred a year was far more than Horace Pentland needed. And that is how he has spent it, to insult the very people who were kind to him.”
Sabine put the papers back in the envelope and, looking up, said in her hard, metallic voice: “Money’s not everything, as I told you once before, Aunt Cassie. I’ve always said that the trouble with the Pentlands ... with most of Boston, for that matter ... lies in the fact that they were lower middle-class shopkeepers to begin with and they’ve never lost any of the lower middle-class virtues ... especially about money. They’ve been proud of living off the income of their incomes.... No, it wasn’t money that Horace Pentland wanted. It was a little decency and kindness and intelligence. I fancy you got your money’s worth out of the poor twenty-five hundred dollars you sent him every year. It was worth a great deal more than that to keep the truth under a bushel.”
A long and painful silence followed this speech and Olivia, turning toward Sabine, tried to reproach her with a glance for speaking thus to the old lady. Aunt Cassie was being put to rout so pitifully, not only by Sabine, but by Horace Pentland, who had taken his vengeance shrewdly, long after he was dead, by striking at the Pentland sense of possessions, of property.
The light of triumph glittered in the green eyes of Sabine. She was paying back, bit by bit, the long account of her unhappy childhood; and she had not yet finished.
Olivia, watching the conflict with disinterest, was swept suddenly by a feeling of pity for the old lady. She broke the painful silence by asking them both to stay for lunch, but this time Aunt Cassie refused, in all sincerity, and Olivia did not press her, knowing that she could not bear to face the ironic grin of Sabine until she had rested and composed her face. Aunt Cassie seemed suddenly tired and old this morning. The indefatigable, meddling spirit seemed to droop, no longer flying proudly in the wind.
The queer, stuffy motor appeared suddenly on the drive, the back seat filled by the rotund form of Miss Peavey surrounded by four yapping Pekinese. The intricate veils which she wore on entering a motor streamed behind her. Aunt Cassie rose and, kissing Olivia with ostentation, turned to Sabine and went back again to the root of the matter. “I always told my dear brother,” she repeated, “that twenty-five hundred a year was far too much for Horace Pentland.”
The motor rattled off, and Sabine, laying the letter on the table beside her, said, “Of course, I don’t want all this stuff of Cousin Horace’s, but I’m determined it shan’t go to her. If she had it the poor old man wouldn’t rest in his grave. Besides, she wouldn’t know what to do with it in a house filled with tassels and antimacassars and souvenirs of UncleNed. She’d only sell it and invest the money in invincible securities.”
“She’s not well ... the poor old thing,” said Olivia. “She wouldn’t have had the motor come for her if she’d been well. She’s pretended all her life, and now she’s really ill—she’s terrified at the idea of death. She can’t bear it.”
The old relentless, cruel smile lighted Sabine’s face. “No, now that the time has come she hasn’t much faith in the Heaven she’s preached all her life.” There was a brief silence and Sabine added grimly, “She will certainly be a nuisance to Saint Peter.”
But there was only sadness in Olivia’s dark eyes, because she kept thinking what a shallow, futile life Aunt Cassie’s had been. She had turned her back upon life from the beginning, even with the husband whom she married as a convenience. She kept thinking what a poor barren thing that life had been; how little of richness, of memories, it held, now that it was coming to an end.
Sabine was speaking again. “I know you’re thinking that I’m heartless, but you don’t know how cruel she was to me ... what things she did to me as a child.” Her voice softened a little, but in pity for herself and not for Aunt Cassie. It was as if the ghost of the queer, unhappy, red-haired little girl of her childhood had come suddenly to stand there beside them where the ghost of Horace Pentland had stood a little while before. The old ghosts were crowding about once more, even there on the terrace in the hot August sunlight in the beauty of Olivia’s flowery garden.
“She sent me into the world,” continued Sabine’s hard voice, “knowing nothing but what was false, believing—the little I believed in anything—in false gods, thinking that marriage was no more than a business contract between two young people with fortunes. She called ignorance by the name of innocence and quoted the Bible and thatmilk-and-water philosopher Emerson ... ‘dear Mr. Emerson’ ... whenever I asked her a direct, sensible question.... And all she accomplished was to give me a hunger for facts—hard, unvarnished facts—pleasant or unpleasant.”
A kind of hot passion entered the metallic voice, so that it took on an unaccustomed warmth and beauty. “You don’t know how much she is responsible for in my life. She ... and all the others like her ... killed my chance of happiness, of satisfaction. She cost me my husband.... What chance had I with a man who came from an older, wiser world ... a world in which things were looked at squarely, and honestly as truth ... a man who expected women to be women and not timid icebergs? No, I don’t think I shall ever forgive her.” She paused for a moment, thoughtfully, and then added, “And whatever she did, whatever cruelties she practised, whatever nonsense she preached, was always done in the name of duty and always ‘for your own good, my dear.’”
Then abruptly, with a bitter smile, her whole manner changed and took on once more the old air of indolent, almost despairing, boredom. “I couldn’t begin to tell you all, my dear.... It goes back too far. We’re all rotten here ... not so much rotten as desiccated, for there was never much blood in us to rot.... The roots go deep.... But I shan’t bore you again with all this, I promise.”
Olivia, listening, wanted to say, “You don’t know how much blood there is in the Pentlands.... You don’t know that they aren’t Pentlands at all, but the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane.... But even that hasn’t mattered.... The very air, the very earth of New England, has changed them, dried them up.”
But she could not say it, for she knew that the story of those letters must never fall into the hands of the unscrupulous Sabine.
“It doesn’t bore me,” said Olivia quietly. “It doesn’t bore me. I understand it much too well.”
“In any case, we’ve spoiled enough of one fine day with it.” Sabine lighted another cigarette and said with an abrupt change of tone, “About this furniture, Olivia.... I don’t want it. I’ve a house full of such things in Paris. I shouldn’t know what to do with it and I don’t think I have the right to break it up and sell it. I want you to have it here at Pentlands.... Horace Pentland would be satisfied if it went to you and Cousin John. And it’ll be an excuse to clear out some of the Victorian junk and some of the terrible early American stuff. Plenty of people will buy the early American things. The best of them are only bad imitations of the real things Horace Pentland collected, and you might as well have the real ones.”
Olivia protested, but Sabine pushed the point, scarcely giving her time to speak. “I want you to do it. It will be a kindness to me ... and after all, Horace Pentland’s furniture ought to be here ... in Pentlands. I’ll take one or two things for Thérèse, and the rest you must keep, only nothing ... not so much as a medallion or a snuff-box ... is to go to Aunt Cassie. She hated him while he was alive. It would be wrong for her to possess anything belonging to him after he is dead. Besides,” she added, “a little new furniture would do a great deal toward cheering up the house. It’s always been rather spare and cold. It needs a little elegance and sense of luxury. There has never been any splendor in the Pentland family—or in all New England, for that matter.”
Atalmost the same moment that Olivia and Sabine entered the old house to lunch, the figures of Sybil and Jeanappeared against the horizon on the rim of the great, bald hill crowned by the town burial-ground. Escaped at length from the eye of the curious, persistent Thérèse, they had come to the hill to eat their lunch in the open air. It was a brilliantly clear day and the famous view lay spread out beneath them like some vast map stretching away for a distance of nearly thirty miles. The marshes appeared green and dark, crossed and recrossed by a reticulation of tidal inlets frequented at nightfall by small boats which brought in whisky and rum from the open sea. There were, distantly visible, great piles of reddish rock rising from the endless white ribbon of beach, and far out on the amethyst sea a pair of white-sailed fishing-boats moved away in the direction of Gloucester. The white sails, so near to each other, carried a warm friendliness in a universe magnificent but also bleak and a little barren.
Coming over the rim of the hill the sudden revelation of the view halted them for a moment. The day was hot, but here on the great hill, remote from the damp, low-lying meadows, there was a fresh cool wind, almost a gale, blowing in from the open sea. Sybil, taking off her hat, tossed it to the ground and allowed the wind to blow her hair in a dark, tangled mass about the serious young face; and at the same moment Jean, seized by a sudden quick impulse, took her hand quietly in his. She did not attempt to draw it away; she simply stood there quietly, as if conscious only of the wild beauty of the landscape spread out below them and the sense of the boy’s nearness to her. The old fear of depression and loneliness seemed to have melted away from her; here on this high brown hill, with all the world spread out beneath, it seemed to her that they were completely alone ... the first and the last two people in all the world. She was aware that a perfect thing had happened to her, so perfect and so farbeyond the realm of her most romantic imaginings that it seemed scarcely real.
A flock of glistening white gulls, sweeping in from the sea, soared toward them screaming wildly, and she said, “We’d better find a place to eat.”
She had taken from the hands of Sabine the task of showing Jean this little corner of his own country, and to-day they had come to see the view from the burial-ground and read the moldering queer old inscriptions on the tombstones. On entering the graveyard they came almost at once to the little corner allotted long ago to immigrants with the name of Pentland—a corner nearly filled now with neat rows of graves. By the side of the latest two, still new and covered with fresh sod, they halted, and she began in silence to separate the flowers she had brought from her mother’s garden into two great bunches.
“This,” she said, pointing to the grave at her feet, “is his. The other grave is Cousin Horace Pentland’s, whom I never saw. He died in Mentone.... He was a first cousin of my grandfather.”
Jean helped her to fill the two vases with water and place the flowers in them. When she had finished she stood up, with a sigh, very straight and slender, saying, “I wish you had known him, Jean. You would have liked him. He was always good-humored and he liked everything in the world ... only he was never strong enough to do much but lie in bed or sit on the terrace in the sun.”
The tears came quietly into her eyes, not at sorrow over the death of her brother, but at the pathos of his poor, weak existence; and Jean, moved by a quick sense of pity, took her hand again and this time kissed it, in the quaint, dignified foreign way he had of doing such things.
They knew each other better now, far better than on the enchanted morning by the edge of the river; and there weretimes, like this, when to have spoken would have shattered the whole precious spell. There was less of shyness between them than of awe at the thing which had happened to them. At that moment he wanted to keep her forever thus, alone with him, on this high barren hill, to protect her and feel her always there at his side touching his arm gently. Here, in such a place, they would be safe from all the unhappiness and the trouble which in a vague way he knew was inevitably a part of living.
As they walked along the narrow path between the rows of chipped, worn old stones they halted now and then to read some half-faded, crumbling epitaph set forth in the vigorous, Biblical language of the first hardy settlers—sometimes amused, sometimes saddened, by the quaint sentiments. They passed rows of Sutherlands and Featherstones and Canes and Mannerings, all turned to dust long ago, the good New England names of that little corner of the world; and at length they came to a little colony of graves with the name Milford cut into each stone. Here there were no new monuments, for the family had disappeared long ago from the Durham world.
In the midst of these Jean halted suddenly and, bending over one of the stones, said, “Milford ... Milford.... That’s odd. I had a great-grandfather named Milford who came from this part of the country.”
“There used to be a great many Milfords here, but there haven’t been any since I can remember.”
“My great-grandfather was a preacher,” said Jean. “A Congregationalist. He led all his congregation into the Middle West. They founded the town my mother came from.”
For a moment Sybil was silent. “Was his name Josiah Milford?” she asked.
“Yes.... That was his name.”
“He came from Durham. And after he left, the churchdied slowly. It’s still standing ... the big white church with the spire, on High Street. It’s only a museum now.”
Jean laughed. “Then we’re not so far apart, after all. It’s almost as if we were related.”
“Yes, because a Pentland did marry a Milford once, a long time ago ... more than a hundred years, I suppose.”
The discovery made her happy in a vague way, perhaps because she knew it made him seem less what they called an “outsider” at Pentlands. It wouldn’t be so hard to say to her father, “I want to marry Jean de Cyon. You know his ancestors came from Durham.” The name of Milford would make an impression upon a man like her father, who made a religion of names; but, then, Jean had not even asked her to marry him yet. For some reason he had kept silent, saying nothing of marriage, and the silence clouded her happiness at being near him.
“It’s odd,” said Jean, suddenly absorbed, in the way of men, over this concrete business of ancestry. “Some of these Milfords must be direct ancestors of mine and I’ve no idea which ones they are.”
“When we go down the hill,” she said, “I’ll take you to the meeting-house and show you the tablet that records the departure of the Reverend Josiah Milford and his congregation.”
She answered him almost without thinking what she was saying, disappointed suddenly that the discovery should have broken in upon the perfection of the mood that united them a little while before.
They found a grassy spot sheltered from the August sun by the leaves of a stunted wild-cherry tree, all twisted by the sea winds, and there Sybil seated herself to open their basket and spread the lunch—the chicken, the crisp sandwiches, thefruit. The whole thing seemed an adventure, as if they were alone on a desert island, and the small act gave her a new kind of pleasure, a sort of primitive delight in serving him while he stood looking down at her with a frank grin of admiration.
When she had finished he flung himself down at full length on the grass beside her, to eat with the appetite of a great, healthy man given to violent physical exercise. They ate almost in silence, saying very little, looking out over the marshes and the sea. From time to time she grew aware that he was watching her with a curious light in his blue eyes, and when they had finished, he sat up cross-legged like a tailor, to smoke; and presently, without looking at her he said, “A little while ago, when we first came up the hill, you let me take your hand, and you didn’t mind.”
“No,” said Sybil swiftly. She had begun to tremble a little, frightened but wildly happy.
“Was it because ... because....” He groped for a moment for words and, finding them, went quickly on, “because you feel as I do?”
She answered him in a whisper. “I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly she felt an overwhelming desire to weep.
“I mean,” he said quietly, “that I feel we were made for each other ... perfectly.”
“Yes ... Jean.”
He did not wait for her to finish. He rushed on, overwhelming her in a quick burst of boyish passion. “I wish it wasn’t necessary to talk. Words spoil everything.... They aren’t good enough.... No, you must take me, Sybil. Sometimes I’m disagreeable and impatient and selfish ... but you must take me. I’ll do my best to reform. I’ll make you happy.... I’ll do anything for you. And we can goaway together anywhere in the world ... always together, never alone ... just as we are here, on the top of this hill.”
Without waiting for her to answer, he kissed her quickly, with a warm tenderness that made her weep once more. She said over and over again, “I’m so happy, Jean ... so happy.” And then, shamefacedly, “I must confess something.... I was afraid you’d never come back, and I wanted you always ... from the very beginning. I meant to have you from the beginning ... from that first day in Paris.”
He lay with his head in her lap while she stroked the thick, red hair, in silence. There in the graveyard, high above the sea, they lost themselves in the illusion which overtakes such young lovers ... that they had come already to the end of life ... that, instead of beginning, it was already complete and perfect.
“I meant to have you always ... Jean. And after you came here and didn’t come over to see me ... I decided to go after you ... for fear that you’d escape again. I was shameless ... and a fraud, too.... That morning by the river ... I didn’t come on you by accident. I knew you were there all the while. I hid in the thicket and waited for you.”
“It wouldn’t have made the least difference. I meant to have you, too.” A sudden impatient frown shadowed the young face. “You won’t let anything change you, will you? Nothing that any one might say ... nothing that might happen ... not anything?”
“Not anything,” she repeated. “Not anything in the world. Nothing could change me.”
“And you wouldn’t mind going away from here with me?”
“No.... I’d like that. It’s what I have always wanted. I’d be glad to go away.”
“Even to the Argentine?”
“Anywhere ... anywhere at all.”
“We can be married very soon ... before I leave ... and then we can go to Paris to see my mother.” He sat up abruptly with an odd, troubled look on his face. “She’s a wonderful woman, darling ... beautiful and kind and charming.”
“I thought she was lovely ... that day in Paris ... the most fascinating woman I’d ever seen, Jean dear.”
He seemed not to be listening to her. The wind was beginning to die away with the heat of the afternoon, and far out on the amethyst sea the two sailing ships lay becalmed and motionless. Even the leaves of the twisted wild-cherry tree hung listlessly in the hot air. All the world about them had turned still and breathless.
Turning, he took both her hands and looked at her. “There’s something I must tell you ... Sybil ... something you may not like. But you mustn’t let it make any difference.... In the end things like that don’t matter.”
She interrupted him. “If it’s about women ... I don’t care. I know what you are, Jean.... I’ll never know any better than I know now.... I don’t care.”
“No ... what I want to tell you isn’t about women. It’s about my mother.” He looked at her directly, piercingly. “You see ... my mother and my father were never married. Good old Monsieur de Cyon only adopted me.... I’ve no right to the name ... really. My name is really John Shane.... They were never married, only it’s not the way it sounds. She’s a great lady, my mother, and she refused to marry my father because ... she says ... she says she found out that he wasn’t what she thought him. He begged her to. He said it ruined his whole life ... but she wouldn’t marry him ... not because she was weak, but because she was strong. You’ll understand that when you come to know her.”
What he said would have shocked her more deeply if she had not been caught in the swift passion of a rebellion againstall the world about her, all the prejudices and the misunderstandings that in her young wisdom she knew would be ranged against herself and Jean. In this mood, the mother of Jean became to her a sort of heroic symbol, a woman to be admired.
She leaned toward him. “It doesn’t matter ... not at all, Jean ... things like that don’t matter in the end.... All that matters is the future....” She looked away from him and added in a low voice, “Besides, what I have to tell you is much worse.” She pressed his hand savagely. “You won’t let it change you? You’ll not give me up? Maybe you know it already ... that I have a grandmother who is mad.... She’s been mad for years ... almost all her life.”
He kissed her quickly. “No, it won’t matter.... Nothing could make me think of giving you up ... nothing in the world.”
“I’m so happy, Jean ... and so peaceful ... as if you had saved me ... as if you’d changed all my life. I’ve been frightened sometimes....”
But a sudden cloud had darkened the happiness ... the cloud that was never absent from the house at Pentlands.
“You won’t let your father keep us apart, Sybil.... He doesn’t like me.... It’s easy to see that.”
“No, I shan’t let him.” She halted abruptly. “What I am going to say may sound dreadful.... I shouldn’t take my father’s word about anything. I wouldn’t let him influence me. He’s spoiled his own life and my mother’s too.... I feel sorry for my father.... He’s so blind ... and he fusses so ... always about things which don’t matter.”
For a long time they sat in silence, Sybil with her eyes closed leaning against him, when suddenly she heard him saying in a fierce whisper, “That damned Thérèse!” and looking up she saw at the rim of the hill beyond the decayingtombstones, the stocky figure of Thérèse, armed with an insect-net and a knapsack full of lunch. She was standing with her legs rather well apart, staring at them out of her queer gray eyes with a mischievous, humorous expression. Behind her in a semicircle stood a little army of dirty Polish children she had recruited to help her collect bugs. They knew that she had followed them deliberately to spy on them, and they knew that she would pretend blandly that she had come upon them quite by accident.
“Shall we tell her?” asked Jean in a furious whisper.
“No ... never tell anything in Durham.”
The spell was broken now and Jean was angry. Rising, he shouted at Thérèse, “Go and chase your old bugs and leave us in peace!” He knew that, like her mother, Thérèse was watching them scientifically, as if they were a pair of insects.
AnsonPentland was not by nature a malicious man or even a very disagreeable one; his fussy activities on behalf of Morality arose from no suppressed, twisted impulse of his own toward vice. Indeed, he was a man of very few impulses—a rather stale, flat man who espoused the cause of Morality because it belonged to his tradition and therefore should be encouraged. He was, according to Sabine, something far worse than an abandoned lecher; he was a bore, and a not very intelligent one, who only saw straight along his own thin nose the tiny sector of the universe in which circumstance had placed him. After forty-nine years of staring, his gaze had turned myopic, and the very physical objects which surrounded him—his house, his office, his table, his desk, his pen—had come to be objects unique and glorified by their very presence as utensils of a society the most elevatedand perfect in existence. Possessed of an immense and intricatesavoir-fairehe lacked even a suspicion ofsavoir-vivre, and so tradition, custom, convention, had made of his life a shriveled affair, without initiative or individuality, slipping along the narrow groove of ways set and uninteresting. It was this, perhaps, which lay at the root of Sybil’s pity for him.
Worshiping the habit of his stale world, he remained content and even amiable so long as no attack was made upon his dignity—a sacred and complicated affair which embraced his house, his friends, his clubs, his ancestors, even to the small possessions allowed him by his father. Yet this dignity was also a frail affair, easily subject to collapse ... a sort of thin shell enclosing and protecting him. He guarded it with a maidenly and implacable zeal. When all the threats and pleadings of Aunt Cassie moved him to nothing more definite than an uneasy sort of evasion, a threat at any of the things which came within the realm of his dignity set loose an unsuspected, spiteful hatred.
He resented O’Hara because he knew perhaps that the Irishman regarded him and his world with cynicism; and it was O’Hara and Irishmen like him—Democrats (thought Anson) and therefore the scum of the earth—who had broken down the perfect, chilled, set model of Boston life. Sabine he hated for the same reasons; and from the very beginning he had taken a dislike to “that young de Cyon” because the young man seemed to stand entirely alone, independent of such dignities, without sign even of respect for them. And he was, too, inextricably allied with O’Hara and Sabine and the “outlandish Thérèse.”
Olivia suspected that he grew shrill and hysterical only at times when he was tormented by a suspicion of their mockery. It was then that hebecame unaccountable for what he said and did ... unaccountable as he had been on that night after the ball. She understood that each day made him more acutely sensitive of his dignity, for he was beginning to interpret the smallest hint as an attack upon it.
Knowing these things, she had come to treat him always as a child, humoring and wheedling him until in the end she achieved what she desired, painlessly and surely. She treated him thus in the matter of refurnishing the house. Knowing that he was absorbed in finishing the final chapters of “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” she suggested that he move his table into the distant “writing-room” where he would be less disturbed by family activities; and Anson, believing that at last his wife was impressed by the importance and dignity of his work, considered the suggestion an excellent one. He even smiled and thanked her.
Then, after having consulted old John Pentland and finding that he approved the plan, she began bit by bit to insinuate the furniture of Horace Pentland into the house. Sabine came daily to watch the progress of the change, to comment and admire and suggest changes. They found an odd excitement in the emergence of one beautiful object after another from its chrysalis ofemballage; out of old rags and shavings there appeared the most exquisite of tables and cabinets, bits of chinoiserie, old books and engravings. One by one the ugly desk used by Mr. Lowell, the monstrous lamp presented by Mr. Longfellow, the anemic water-colors of Miss Maria Pentland ... all the furnishings of the museum were moved into the vast old attic; until at length a new drawing-room emerged, resplendent and beautiful, civilized and warm and even a little exotic, dressed in all the treasures which Horace Pentland had spent his life in gathering with passionate care. Quietly and almost without its being noticed, the family skeleton took possession of the house, transforming its whole character.
The change produced in Aunt Cassie a variety of confusedand conflicting emotions. It seemed sacrilege to her that the worn, familiar, homely souvenirs of her father’s “dear friends” should be relegated into the background, especially by the hand of Horace Pentland; yet it was impossible for her to overlook the actual value of the collection. She saw the objects less as things of rare beauty than in terms of dollars and cents. And, as she had said, “Pentland things ought to find a place in a Pentland house.” She suspected Sabine of Machiavellian tactics and could not make up her mind whether Sabine and Horace Pentland had not triumphed in the end over herself and “dear Mr. Lowell” and “good, kind Mr. Longfellow.”
Anson, strangely enough, liked the change, with reservations. For a long time he had been conscious of the fact that the drawing-room and much of the rest of the house seemed shabby and worn, and so, unworthy of such dignity as attached to the Pentland name.
He stood in the doorway of the drawing-room, surveying the transformation, and remarked, “The effect seems good ... a little flamboyant, perhaps, and undignified for such a house, but on the whole ... good ... quite good. I myself rather prefer the plain early American furniture....”
To which Sabine replied abruptly, “But it makes hard sitting.”
Until now there had never been any music at Pentlands, for music was regarded in the family as something you listened to in concert-halls, dressed in your best clothes. Aunt Cassie, with Miss Peavey, had gone regularly for years each Friday afternoon, to sit hatless with a scarf over her head in Symphony Hall listening to “dear Colonel Higginson’s orchestra” (which had fallen off so sadly since his death), but she had never learned to distinguish one melody from another.... Music at Pentlands had always been a culturalduty, an exercise something akin to attending church. It made no more impression on Aunt Cassie than those occasional trips to Europe when, taking her own world with her, she stayed always at hotels where she would encounter friends from Boston and never be subjected to the strain of barbaric, unsympathetic faces and conversations.
And now, quite suddenly, music at Pentlands became something alive and colorful and human. The tinny old square piano disappeared and in its place there was a great new one bought by Olivia out of her own money. In the evenings the house echoed to the sound of Chopin and Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, and even such barbaric newcomers as Stravinsky and Ravel. Old Mrs. Soames came, when she was well enough, to sit in the most comfortable of the Regence chairs with old John Pentland at her side, listening while the shadow of youth returned to her half-blind old eyes. The sound of Jean’s music penetrated sometimes as far as the room of the mad old woman in the north wing and into the writing-room, where it disturbed Anson working on “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”
And then one night, O’Hara came in after dinner, dressed in clothes cut rather too obviously along radically fashionable lines. It was the first time he had ever set foot on Pentland soil.