Early Autumn (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 1)/Chapter 8
The death 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 the Transcript, 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 of her 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, allowing the 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 Uncle Ned. 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 that milk-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, sarcely 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."
At almost the same moment that Olivia and Sabine entered the old house to lunch, the figures of Sybil and Jean appeared 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 far beyond 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 were times, 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 church died 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, the fruit. 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 go away 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 against all 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 decaying tombstones, 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.
Anson Pentland 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 elevated and perfect in existence. Possessed of an immense and intricate savoir-faire he lacked even a suspicion of savoir-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 he became 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 of emballage; 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 confused and 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 cultural duty, 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.
There were times now when Aunt Cassie told herself that Olivia's strange moods had vanished at last, leaving in their place the old docile, pleasant Olivia who had always had a way of smoothing out the troubles at Pentlands. The sudden perilous calm no longer settled over their conversations; Aunt Cassie was no longer fearful of "speaking her mind, frankly, for the good of all of them." Olivia listened to her quietly, and it is true that she was happier in one sense because life at Pentlands seemed to be working itself out; but inwardly, she went her own silent way, grieving in solitude because she dared not add the burden of her grief to that of old John Pentland. Even Sabine, more subtle in such things than Aunt Cassie, came to feel herself quietly shut out from Olivia's confidence.
Sybil, slipping from childhood into womanhood, no longer depended upon her; she even grew withdrawn and secret about Jean, putting her mother off with empty phrases where once she had confided everything. Behind the pleasant, quiet exterior, it seemed to Olivia at times that she had never been so completely, so superbly, alone. She began to see that at Pentlands life came to arrange itself into a series of cubicles, each occupied by a soul shut in from all the others. And she came, for the first time in her life, to spend much time thinking of herself.
With the beginning of autumn she would be forty years old . . . on the verge of middle-age, a woman perhaps with a married daughter. Perhaps at forty-two she would be a grandmother (it seemed likely with such a pair as Sybil and young de Cyon) . . . a grandmother at forty-two with her hair still thick and black, her eyes bright, her face unwrinkled . . . a woman who at forty-two might pass for a woman ten years younger. A grandmother was a grandmother, no matter how youthful she appeared. As a grandmother she could not afford to make herself ridiculous.
She could perhaps persuade Sybil to wait a year or two and so put off the evil day, yet such an idea was even more abhorrent to her. The very panic which sometimes seized her at the thought of turning slowly into an old woman lay also at the root of her refusal to delay Sybil's marriage. What was happening to Sybil had never happened to herself and never could happen now; she was too old, too hard, even too cynical. When one was young like Jean and Sybil, one had an endless store of faith and hope. There was still a glow over all life, and one ought to begin that way. Those first years—no matter what came afterward—would be the most precious in all their existence; and looking about her, she thought, "There are so few who ever have that chance, so few who can build upon a foundation so solid."
Sometimes there returned to her a sudden twinge of the ancient, shameful jealousy which she had felt for Sybil's youth that suffocating night on the terrace overlooking the sea. (In an odd way, all the summer unfolding itself slowly seemed to have grown out of that night.)
No, in the end she returned always to the same thought . . . that she would sacrifice everything to the perfection of this thing which existed between Sybil and the impatient, red-haired young man.
When she was honest with herself, she knew that she would have had no panic, no terror, save for O'Hara. Save for him she would have had no fear of growing old, of seeing Sybil married and finding herself a grandmother. She had prayed for all these things, even that Fate should send Sybil just such a lover; and now that her prayer was answered there were times when she wished wickedly that he had not come, or at least not so promptly. When she was honest, the answer was always the same . . . that O'Hara had come to occupy the larger part of her interest in existence.
In the most secret part of her soul, she no longer pretended that her feeling for him was only one of friendship. She was in love with him. She rose each morning joyfully to ride with him across the meadows, pleased that Sybil came with them less and less frequently; and on the days when he was kept in Boston a cloud seemed to darken all her thoughts and actions. She talked to him of his future, his plans, the progress of his campaign, as if already she were his wife or his mistress. She played traitor to all her world whose fortunes rested on the success and power of his political enemies. She came to depend upon his quick sympathy. He had a Gaelic way of understanding her moods, her sudden melancholy, that had never existed in the phlegmatic, insensitive world of Pentlands.
She was honest with herself after the morning when, riding along the damp, secret paths of the birch thicket, he halted his horse abruptly and with a kind of anguish told her that he could no longer go on in the way they were going.
He said, "What do you want me to do? I am good for nothing. I can think of nothing but you . . . all day and all night. I go to Boston and try to work and all the while I'm thinking of you . . . thinking what is to be done. You must see what hell it is for me . . . to be near you like this and yet to be treated only as a friend."
Abruptly, when she turned and saw the suffering in his eyes, she knew there was no longer any doubt. She asked sadly, "What do you want me to do? What can I do? You make me feel that I am being the cheapest, silliest sort of woman." And in a low voice she added, "I don't mean to be, Michael. . . . I love you, Michael. . . . Now I've told you. You are the only man I've ever loved . . . even the smallest bit."
A kind of ecstatic joy took possession of him. He leaned over and kissed her, his own tanned face dampened by her tears.
"I'm so happy," she said, "and yet so sad. . . ."
"If you love me . . . then we can go our way . . . we need not think of any of the others."
"Oh, it's not so easy as that, my dear." She had never before been so conscious of his presence, of that strange sense of warmth and charm which he seemed to impose on everything about him.
"I do have to think of the others," she said. "Not my husband. . . . I don't think he even cares so long as the world knows nothing. But there's Sybil. . . . I can't make a fool of myself on account of Sybil."
She saw quickly that she had used the wrong phrase, that she had hurt him; striking without intention at the fear which he sometimes had that she thought him a common, vulgar Irish politician.
"Do you think that this thing between us . . . might be called 'making a fool of yourself'?" he asked with a faint shade of bitterness.
"No . . . you know me better than that. . . . You know I was thinking only of myself . . . as a middle-aged woman with a daughter ready to be married."
"But she will be married . . . soon . . . surely. Young de Cyon isn't the sort who waits."
"Yes . . . that's true . . . but even then." She turned quickly. "What do you want me to do? . . . Do you want me to be your mistress?"
"I want you for my own. . . . I want you to marry me."
"Do you want me as much as that?"
"I want you as much as that. . . . I can't bear the thought of sharing you . . . of having you belong to any one else."
"Oh . . . I've belonged to no one for a great many years now . . . not since Jack was born."
He went on, hurriedly, ardently. "It would change all my life. It would give me some reason to go on. . . . Save for you. . . . I'd chuck everything and go away. . . . I'm sick of it."
"And you want me for my own sake . . . not just because I'll help your career and give you an interest in life."
"For your own sake . . . nothing else, Olivia."
"You see, I ask because I've thought a great deal about it. I'm older than you, Michael. I seem young now. . . . But at forty. . . . I'll be forty in the autumn . . . at forty being older makes a difference. It cuts short our time. . . . It's not as if we were in our twenties. . . . I ask you, too, because you are a clever man and must see these things, too."
"None of it makes any difference." He looked so tragically in earnest, there was such a light in his blue eyes, that her suspicions died. She believed him.
"But we can't marry . . . ever," she said, "so long as my husband is alive. He'll never divorce me nor let me divorce him. It's one of his passionate beliefs . . . that divorce is a wicked thing. Besides, there has never been a divorce in the Pentland family. There have been worse things," she said bitterly, "but never a divorce and Anson won't be the first to break any tradition."
"Will you talk to him?"
"Just now, Michael, I think I'd do anything . . . even that. But it will do no good." For a time they were both silent, caught in a profound feeling of hopelessness, and presently she said, "Can you go on like this for a little time . . . until Sybil is gone?"
"We're not twenty . . . either of us. We can't wait too long."
"I can't desert her yet. You don't know how it is at Pentlands. I've got to save her, even if I lose myself. I fancy they'll be married before winter . . . even before autumn . . . before he leaves. And then I shall be free. I couldn't . . . I couldn't be your mistress now, Michael . . . with Sybil still in there at Pentlands with me. . . . I may be quibbling. . . . I may sound silly, but it does make a difference . . . because perhaps I've lived among them for too long."
"You promise me that when she's gone you'll be free?"
"I promise you, Michael. . . . I've told you that I love you . . . that you're the only man I've ever loved . . . even the smallest bit."
"Mrs. Callendar will help us. . . . She wants it."
"Oh, Sabine. . . ." She was startled. "You haven't spoken to her? You haven't told her anything?"
"No. . . . But you don't need to tell her such things. She has a way of knowing." After a moment he said, "Why, even Higgins wants it. He keeps saying to me, in an offhand sort of way, as if what he said meant nothing at all, 'Mrs. Pentland is a fine woman, sir. I've known her for years. Why, she's even helped me out of scrapes. But it's a pity she's shut up in that mausoleum with all those dead ones. She ought to have a husband who's a man. She's married to a living corpse.'"
Olivia flushed. "He has no right to talk that way. . . ."
"If you could hear him speak, you'd know that it's not disrespect, but because he worships you. He'd kiss the ground you walk over." And looking down, he added, "He says it's a pity that a thoroughbred like you is shut up at Pentlands. You mustn't mind his way of saying it. He's something of a horse-breeder and so he sees such things in the light of truth."
She knew, then, what O'Hara perhaps had failed to understand—that Higgins was touching the tragedy of her son, a son who should have been strong and full of life, like Jean. And a wild idea occurred to her—that she might still have a strong son, with O'Hara as the father, a son who would be a Pentland heir but without the Pentland taint. She might do what Savina Pentland had done. But she saw at once how absurd such an idea was; Anson would know well enough that it was not his son.
They rode on slowly and in silence while Olivia thought wearily round and round the dark, tangled maze in which she found herself. There seemed no way out of it. She was caught, shut in a prison, at the very moment when her chance of happiness had come.
They came suddenly out of the thicket into the lane that led from Aunt Cassie's gazeboed house to Pentlands, and as they passed through the gate they saw Aunt Cassie's antiquated motor drawn up at the side of the road. The old lady was nowhere to be seen, but at the sound of hoofs the rotund form and silly face of Miss Peavey emerged from the bushes at one side, her bulging arms filled with great bunches of some weed.
She greeted Olivia and nodded to O'Hara. "I've been gathering catnip for my cats," she called out. "It grows fine and thick there in the damp ground by the spring."
Olivia smiled . . . a smile that gave her a kind of physical pain . . . and they rode on, conscious all the while that Miss Peavey's china-blue eyes were following them. She knew that Miss Peavey was too silly and innocent to suspect anything, but she would, beyond all doubt, go directly to Aunt Cassie with a detailed description of the encounter. Very little happened in Miss Peavey's life and such an encounter loomed large. Aunt Cassie would draw from her all the tiny details, such as the fact that Olivia looked as if she had been weeping.
Olivia turned to O'Hara. "There's nothing malicious about poor Miss Peavey," she said, "but she's a fool, which is far more dangerous."