4
As she left the room to follow him she stopped for a moment to say to Sybil, “Are you happy, my dear? You’re not sorry that you aren’t going back to school in Saint-Cloud?”
“No, Mama; why shouldn’t I be happy here? I love it, more than anything in the world.”
The girl thrust her hands into the pockets of her riding-coat.
“You don’t think I was wrong to send you to France to school ... away from every one here?”
Sybil laughed and looked at her mother in the frank, half-mocking way she had when she fancied she had uncovered a plot.
“Are you worrying about marrying me off? I’m only eighteen. I’ve lots of time.”
“I’m worrying because I think you’ll be so hard to please.”
Again she laughed. “That’s true. That’s why I’m going to take my time.”
“And you’re glad to have Thérèse here?”
“Of course. You know I like Thérèse awfully, Mama.”
“Very well ... run along now. I must speak to your grandfather.”
And the girl went out onto the terrace where Jack stood waiting in the sun for the trap. He always followed the sun, choosing to sit in it even in midsummer, as if he were never quite warm enough.
She was worried over Sybil. She had begun to think that perhaps Aunt Cassie was right when she said that Sybil ought to go to a boarding-school with the girls she had always known, to grow loud and noisy and awkward and play hockey and exchange silly notes with the boys in the boarding-school in the next village. Perhaps it was wrong to have sent Sybil away to a school where she would meet girls from France and England and Russia and South America ... half the countries of the world; a school where, as Aunt Cassie had said bitterly, she would be forced to associate with the “daughters of dancers and opera singers.” She knew now that Sybil hadn’t liked the ball any more than Thérèse, who had run away from it without a word of explanation. Only with Thérèse it didn’t matter so much, because the dark stubborn head was filled with all sorts of wild notions about science and painting and weird books on psychology. There was a loneliness about Thérèse and her mother, Sabine Callendar, only with them it didn’t matter. They had, too, a hardness, a sense of derision and scorn which protected them. Sybil hadn’t any such protections. Perhaps she was even wrong in having made of Sybil a lady—a lady in the old sense of the word—because there seemed to be no place for a lady in the scheme of life as it had existed at the dance the night before. It was perilous, having a lady on one’s hands, especially a lady who was certain to take life as passionately as Sybil.
She wanted the girl to be happy, without quite understanding that it was because Sybil seemed the girl she had once been herself, a very part of herself, the part which had never lived at all.
She found her father-in-law seated at his great mahogany desk in the high narrow room walled with books which was kept sacred to him, at the desk from which he managed the farm and watched over a fortune, built up bit by bit shrewdly, thriftily over three hundred years, a fortune which he had never brought himself to trust in the hands of his son. It was, in its gloomy, cold way, a pleasant room, smelling of dogs and apples and wood-smoke, and sometimes of whisky, for it was here that the old man retired when, in a kind of baffled frenzy, he drank himself to insensibility. It was here that he would sometimes sit for a day and a night, even sleeping in his leather chair, refusing to see any one save Higgins, who watched over him, and Olivia. And so it was Olivia and Higgins who alone knew the spectacle of this solitary drinking. The world and even the family knew very little of it—only the little which sometimes leaked out from the gossip of servants straying at night along the dark lanes and hedges about Durham.
He sat with his coffee and a glass of Courvoisier before him while he smoked, with an air of being lost in some profound worry, for he did not look up at once when she entered, but sat staring before him in an odd, enchanted fashion. It was not until she had taken a cigarette from the silver box and lighted it that he looked up at the sound of the striking match and, focusing the burning black eyes, said to her, “Jack seems very well to-day.”
“Yes, better than he has been in a long time.”
“Perhaps, after all, the doctors are wrong.”
Olivia sighed and said quietly, “If we had believed the doctors we should have lost him long ago.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
She poured her coffee and he murmured, “It’s about Horace Pentland I wanted to speak. He’s dead. I got the news this morning. He died in Mentone and now it’s a question whether we shall bring him home here to be buried in Durham with the rest of the family.”
Olivia was silent for a moment and then, looking up, said, “What do you think? How long has it been that he has lived in Mentone?”
“It’s nearly thirty years now that I’ve been sending him money to stay there. He’s only a cousin. Still, we had the same grandfather and he’d be the first of the family in three hundred years who isn’t buried here.”
“There was Savina Pentland....”
“Yes.... But she’s buried out there, and she would have been buried here if it had been possible.”
And he made a gesture in the direction of the sea, beyond the marshes where the beautiful Savina Pentland, almost a legend now, lay, somewhere deep down in the soft white sand at the bottom of the ocean.
“Would he want to be buried here?” asked Olivia.
“He wrote and asked me ... a month or two before he died. It seemed to be on his mind. He put it in a strange way. He wrote that he wanted to come home.”
Again Olivia was thoughtful for a time. “Strange ...” she murmured presently, “when people were so cruel to him.”
The lips of the old man stiffened a little.
“It was his own fault....”
“Still ... thirty years is a long time.”
He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. “You mean that everything may have been forgotten by now?”
Olivia made a little gesture with her white, ringless hands. “Why not?”
“Because people don’t forget things like that ... not in our world, at any rate.”
Quietly, far back in her mind, Olivia kept trying to imagine this Horace Pentland whom she had never seen, this shadowy old man, dead now, who had been exiled for thirty years.
“You have no reason for not wanting him here among all the others?”
“No ... Horace is dead now.... It can’t matter much whether what’s left of him is buried here or in France.”
“Except, of course, that they may have been kinder to him over there.... They’re not so harsh.”
A silence fell over them, as if in some way the spirit of Horace Pentland, the sinner whose name was never spoken in the family save between Olivia and the old man, had returned and stood between them, waiting to hear what was to be done with all that remained of him on this earth. It was one of those silences which, descending upon the old house, sometimes filled Olivia with a vague uneasiness. They had a way of descending upon the household in the long evenings when all the family sat reading in the old drawing-room—as if there were figures unseen who stood watching.
“If he wanted to be buried here,” said Olivia, “I can see no reason why he should not be.”
“Cassie will object to raking up an old scandal that has been forgotten.”
“Surely that can’t matter now ... when the poor old man is dead. We can be kind to him now ... surely we can be kind to him now.”
John Pentland sighed abruptly, a curious, heart-breaking sigh that seemed to have escaped even his power of steely control; and presently he said, “I think you are right, Olivia.... I will do as you say ... only we’ll keep it a secret between us until the time comes when it’s necessary to speak. And then ... then we’ll have a quiet funeral.”
She would have left him then save that she knew from his manner that there were other things he wanted to say. He had a way of letting you know his will without speaking. Somehow, in his presence you felt that it was impossible to leave until he had dismissed you. He still treated his own son, who was nearly fifty, as if he were a little boy.
Olivia waited, busying herself by rearranging the late lilacs which stood in a tall silver vase on the polished mahogany desk.
“They smell good,” he said abruptly. “They’re the last, aren’t they?”
“The last until next spring.”
“Next spring ...” he repeated with an air of speaking to himself. “Next spring....” And then abruptly, “The other thing was about Sabine. The nurse tells me she has discovered that Sabine is here.” He made the family gesture toward the old north wing. “She has asked to see Sabine.”
“Who told her that Sabine had returned? How could she have discovered it?”
“The nurse doesn’t know. She must have heard some one speaking the name under her window. The nurse says that people in her condition have curious ways of discovering such things ... like a sixth sense.”
“Do you want me to ask Sabine? She’d come if I asked her.”
“It would be unpleasant. Besides, I think it might do harm in some way.”
Olivia was silent for a moment. “How? She probably wouldn’t remember Sabine. When she saw her last, Sabine was a young girl.”
“She’s gotten the idea now that we’re all against her, that we’re persecuting her in some way.” He coughed and blew a cloud of smoke out of his thin-drawn lips. “It’s difficult to explain what I mean.... I mean that Sabine might encourage that feeling ... quite without meaning to, that Sabine might give her the impression that she was an ally. There’s something disturbing about Sabine.”
“Anson thinks so, too,” said Olivia softly. “He’s been talking to me about it.”
“She ought never to have come back here. It’s difficult ... what I am trying to say. Only I feel that she’s up to some mischief. I think she hates us all.”
“Not all of us....”
“Not perhaps you. You never belonged here. It’s only those of us who have always been here.”
“But she’s fond of you....”
“Her father and I were good friends. He was very like her ... disagreeable and given to speaking unpleasant truths.... He wasn’t a popular man. Perhaps that’s why she’s friendly toward me ... on account of him.”
“No, it’s more than that....”
Slowly Olivia felt herself slipping back into that state of confused enchantment which had overwhelmed her more and more often of late. It seemed that life grew more and more tenuous and complicated, more blurred and indistinct, until at times it became simply a morass of minute problems in which she found herself mired and unable to act. No one spoke directly any more. It was like living in a world of shadows. And this old man, her father-in-law, was the greatest puzzle of all, because it was impossible ever to know how much he understood of what went on about him, how much he chose to ignore in the belief that by denying its existence it would cease to exist.
Sitting there, puzzled, she began to pull a leaf from the cluster of lilacs into tiny bits.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think Sabine is unhappy....”
“No ... not that.... She’s beyond happiness or unhappiness. There’s something hard in her and unrelenting ... as hard as a cut diamond. She’s a clever woman and a queer one. She’s one of those strange creatures that are thrown off now and then by people like us. There’s nothing else quite like them in the world. They go to strange extremes. Horace was the same ... in a different, less creditable fashion.”
Olivia looked at him suddenly, astonished by the sudden flash of penetration in the old man, one of those sudden, quick gleams which led her to believe that far down, in the depths of his soul, he was far more profound, far more intelligent, unruly and defiant of tradition than he ever allowed the world to suppose. It was always the old question. How much did he know? How much did he not know ... far back, behind the lined, severe, leathery old face? Or was it a sort of clairvoyance, not of eternal illness, like Jack’s, but of old age?
“I shall ask Sabine,” she began.
“It’s not necessary at the moment. She appears to have forgotten the matter temporarily. But she’ll remember it again and then I think it will be best to humor her, whatever comes. She may not think of it again for months ... until Sabine has gone.... I only wanted to ask you ... to consult you, Olivia. I thought you could arrange it.”
She rose and, turning to go, she heard him saying, “She might like some lilacs in her room.” He hesitated and in a flat, dead voice, added, “She used to be very fond of flowers.”
Olivia, avoiding the dark eyes, thought, “She used to be very fond of flowers.... That means forty years ago ... forty long years. Oh, my God!” But after a second she said simply, “She has taken a dislike to flowers. She fancies they take up the air and stifle her. The sight of them is very bad for her.”
“I should have known you’d already thought of it.”
For an instant the old man stood facing her with a fixed and searching expression which made her feel shy and led her to turn away from him a little; and then all at once, with an air strangely timid and frightened in a man so grim in appearance, he took her hand and kissing her on the forehead murmured, “You’re a good girl, Olivia. They’re right in what they say of you. You’re a good girl. I don’t know how I should have managed without you all these years.”
Smiling, she looked at him, and then, touching his hand affectionately, she went out without speaking again, thinking, as she had thought a thousand times, what a terrible thing it must be to have been born so inarticulate and so terrified of feeling as John Pentland. It must be, she thought, like living forever imprisoned in a shell of steel from which one might look out and see friends but never touch or know them.
From the doorway she heard a voice behind her, saying almost joyfully: “The doctors must have been wrong about Jack. You and I together, Olivia, have defeated them.”
She said, “Yes,” and smiled at him, but when she had turned away again there was in her mind a strange, almost gruesome thought.
“If only Jack lives until his grandfather is dead, the old man will die happy. If only he can be kept alive until then....”
She had a strange way of seeing things in the hard light of reality, and an unreal, lonely childhood had fostered the trait. She had been born thus, and now as a woman she found that in a way it was less a curse than a blessing. In a world which survived only by deceiving itself, she found that seeing the truth and knowing it made her strong. Here, perhaps, lay the reason why all of them had come to depend upon her. But there were times, too, when she wanted passionately to be a poor weak feminine creature, a woman who might turn to her husband and find in him some one stronger than herself. She had a curious feeling of envy for Savina Pentland, who was dead before she was born.... Savina Pentland who had been the beauty of the family, extravagant, reckless, feminine, who bought strings of pearls and was given to weeping and fainting.
But she (Olivia) had only Anson to lean upon.
After she had gone away the old man sat for a long time smoking and drinking his brandy, enveloped by a loneliness scarcely more profound than it had been a little while before when he sat talking with Olivia. It was his habit to sit thus sometimes for an hour at a time, unconscious, it seemed, of all the world about him; Olivia had come in more than once at such moments and gone away again, unwilling to shatter the enchantment by so much as a single word.
At last, when the cigar had burned to an end, he crushed out the ember with a short, fierce gesture and, rising, went out of the tall narrow room and along the corridor that led to the dark stairway in the old north wing. These steps he had climbed every day since it had become necessary to keep her in the country the year round ... every day, at the same hour, step by step his big heavy-shod boots had trod the same worn stair carpet. It was a journey begun years ago as a kind of pleasure colored by hope, which for a long time now, bereft of all hope, had become merely a monotonous dreary duty. It was like a journey of penance made by some pilgrim on his knees up endless flights of stairs.
For more than twenty years, as far back as Olivia could remember, he had been absent from the house for a night but twice, and then only on occasions of life and death. In all that time he had been twice to New York and never once to the Europe he had not seen since, as a boy, he had made the grand tour on a plan laid out by old General Curtis ... a time so remote now that it must have seemed part of another life. In all those years he had never once escaped from the world which his family found so perfect and complete and which to him must have seemed always a little cramped and inadequate. Fate and blood and circumstance, one might have said, had worn him down bit by bit until in the end he had come to worship the same gods they worshiped. Now and then he contrived to escape them for a little while by drinking himself into insensibility, but always he awakened again to find that nothing had changed, to discover that his prison was the same. And so, slowly, hope must have died.
But no one knew, even Olivia, whether he was happy or unhappy; and no one would ever really know what had happened to him, deep inside, behind the gray, leathery old face.
The world said, when it thought of him: “There never was such a devoted husband as John Pentland.”
Slowly and firmly he walked along the narrow hall to the end and there halted to knock on the white door. He always knocked, for there were times when the sight of him, entering suddenly, affected her so that she became hysterical and beyond all control.
In response to the knock, the door was opened gently and professionally by Miss Egan, an automaton of a nurse—neat, efficient, inhuman and incredibly starched, whose very smile seemed to come and go by some mechanical process, like the sounds made by squeezing a mechanical doll. Only it was impossible to imagine squeezing anything so starched and jagged as the red-faced Miss Egan. It was a smile which sprang into existence upon sight of any member of the family, a smile of false humility which said, “I know very well that you cannot do without me”—the smile of a woman well enough content to be paid three times the wages of an ordinary nurse. In three or four more years she would have enough saved to start a sanatorium of her own.
Fixing her smile, she faced the old man, saying, “She seems quite well to-day ... very quiet.”
The whole hallway had been flooded at the opening of the door by a thick and complicated odor arising from innumerable medicines that stood row upon row in the obscurity of the dark room. The old man stepped inside, closing the door quickly behind him, for she was affected by too much light. She could not bear to have a door or a window open near her; even on this bright day the drawn shades kept the room in darkness.
She had got the idea somehow that there were people outside who waited to leer at her ... hundreds of them all pressing their faces against the panes to peep into her bedroom. There were days when she could not be quieted until the window-shades were covered by thick layers of black cloth. She would not rise from her bed until nightfall lest the faces outside might see her standing there in her nightdress.
It was only when darkness had fallen that the nurse was able by means of trickery and wheedling to air the room, and so it smelled horribly of the medicines she never took, but kept ranged about her, row upon row, like the fetishes of witch-doctors. In this they humored her as they had humored her in shutting out the sunlight, because it was the only way they could keep her quiet and avoid sending her away to some place where she would have been shut behind bars. And this John Pentland would not even consider.
When he entered she was lying in the bed, her thin, frail body barely outlined beneath the bedclothes ... the mere shadow of a woman who must once have been pretty in a delicate way. But nothing remained now of the beauty save the fine modeling of the chin and nose and brow. She lay there, a queer, unreal old woman, with thin white hair, skin like parchment and a silly, vacant face as unwrinkled as that of a child. As he seated himself beside her, the empty, round blue eyes opened a little and stared at him without any sign of recognition. He took one of the thin, blue-veined hands in his, but it only lay there, lifeless, while he sat, silent and gentle, watching her.
Once he spoke, calling her wistfully by name, “Agnes”; but there was no sign of an answer, not so much as a faint flickering of the white, transparent lids.
And so for an eternity he sat thus in the thick darkness, enveloped by the sickly odor of medicines, until he was roused by a knock at the door and the sudden glare of daylight as it opened and Miss Egan, fixing her flashing and teethy smile, came in and said: “The fifteen minutes is up, Mr. Pentland.”
When the door had closed behind him he went away again, slowly, thoughtfully, down the worn stairs and out into the painfully brilliant sunlight of the bright New England spring. Crossing the green terrace, bordered with great clumps of iris and peonies and a few late tulips, he made his way to the stable-yard, where Higgins had left the red mare in charge of a Polish boy who did odd tasks about the farm. The mare, as beautiful and delicate as a fine steel spring, stood nervously pawing the gravel and tossing her handsome head. The boy, a great lout with a shock of yellow hair, stood far away from her holding the reins at arm’s length.
At the sight of the two the old man laughed and said, “You mustn’t let her know you’re afraid of her, Ignaz.”
The boy gave up the reins and retired to a little distance, still watching the mare resentfully. “Well, she tried to bite me!” he said sullenly.
Quickly, with a youthful agility, John Pentland swung himself to her back ... quickly enough to keep her from sidling away from him. There was a short, fierce struggle between the rider and the horse, and in a shower of stones they sped away down the lane that led across the meadows, past the thicket of black pines and the abandoned gravel-pit, toward the house of Mrs. Soames.
CHAPTER IV
In the solid corner of the world which surrounded Durham, Aunt Cassie played the rôle of an unofficial courier who passed from house to house, from piazza to piazza, collecting and passing on the latest bits of news. When one saw a low cloud of dust moving across the brilliant New England sky above the hedges and stone walls of the countryside, one could be certain that it masked the progress of Cassie Struthers on her daily round of calls. She went always on foot, because she detested motors and was terrified of horses; one might see her coming from a great distance, dressed always in dingy black, tottering along very briskly (for a woman of her age and well-advertised infirmities). One came to expect her arrival at a certain hour, for she was, unless there arose in her path some calamity or piece of news of unusual interest, a punctual woman whose life was as carefully ordered as the vast house in which she lived with the queer Aunt Bella.
It was a great box of a dwelling built by the late Mr. Struthers in the days of cupolas and gazebos on land given him by Aunt Cassie’s grandfather on the day of her wedding. Inside it was furnished with a great profusion of plush tassels and antimacassars, all kept with the neatness and rigidity of a museum. There were never any cigar ashes on the floor, nor any dust in the corners, for Aunt Cassie followed her servants about with the eye of a fussy old sergeant inspecting his barracks. Poor Miss Peavey, who grew more and more dowdy and careless as old age began to settle over her, led a life of constant peril, and was forced to build a little house near the stables to house her Pomeranians and her Siamese cats. For Aunt Cassie could not abide the thought of “the animals dirtying up the house.” Even the “retiring room” of the late Mr. Struthers had been converted since his death into a museum, spotless and purified of tobacco and whisky, where his chair sat before his desk, turned away from it a little, as if his spirit were still seated there. On the desk lay his pipe (as he had left it) and the neat piles of paper (carefully dusted each day but otherwise undisturbed) which he had put there with his own hand on the morning they found him seated on the chair, his head fallen back a little, as if asleep. And in the center of the desk lay two handsomely bound volumes—“Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards”—which he had written in these last sad years when his life seemed slowly to fade from him ... the years in which Aunt Cassie seemed rapidly to recover the wiry strength and health for which she had been famous as a girl.
The house, people said, had been built by Mr. Struthers in the expectation of a large family, but it had remained great and silent of children’s voices as a tomb since the day it was finished, for Aunt Cassie had never been strong until it was too late for her to bear him heirs.
Sabine Callendar had a whole set of theories about the house and about the married life of Aunt Cassie, but they were theories which she kept, in her way, entirely to herself, waiting and watching until she was certain of them. There was a hatred between the two women that was implacable and difficult to define, an emotion almost of savagery which concealed itself beneath polite phrases and casual observations of an acid character. They encountered each other more frequently than Aunt Cassie would have wished, for Sabine, upon her return to Durham, took up Aunt Cassie’s habit of going from house to house on foot in search of news and entertainment. They met in drawing-rooms, on piazzas, and sometimes in the very dusty lanes, greeting each other with smiles and vicious looks. They had become rather like two hostile cats watching each other for days at a time, stealthily. Sabine, Aunt Cassie confided in Olivia, made her nervous.
Still, it was Aunt Cassie who had been the first caller at Brook Cottage after the arrival of Sabine. The younger woman had seen her approach, enveloped in a faint cloud of dust, from the windows of Brook Cottage, and the sight filled her with an inexpressible delight. The spare old lady had come along so briskly, almost with impatience, filled with delight (Sabine believed) at having an excuse now to trespass on O’Hara’s land and see what he had done to the old cottage. And Sabine believed, too, that she came to discover what life had done to “dear Mr. Struthers’ niece, Sabine Callendar.” She came as the Official Welcomer of the Community, with hope in her heart that she would find Sabine a returned prodigal, a wrecked woman, ravaged by time and experience, who for twenty years had ignored them all and now returned, a broken and humbled creature, hungry for kindness.
The sight set fire to a whole train of memories in Sabine ... memories which penetrated deep into her childhood when with her father she had lived in the old house that once stood where O’Hara’s new one raised its bright chimneys; memories of days when she had run off by herself to play in the tangled orchard grass among the bleeding-hearts and irises that surrounded this same Brook Cottage where she stood watching the approach of Aunt Cassie. Only, in those days Brook Cottage had been a ruin of a place, with empty windows and sagging doors, ghostly and half-hidden by a shaggy tangle of lilacs and syringas, and now it stood glistening with new paint, the lilacs all neatly clipped and pruned.
There was something in the sight of the old woman’s nervous, active figure that struck deep down into a past which Sabine, with the passing of years, had almost succeeded in forgetting; and now it all came back again, sharply and with a kind of stabbing pain, so that she had a sudden odd feeling of having become a little girl again ... plain, red-haired, freckled and timid, who stood in terror of Aunt Cassie and was always being pulled here and there by a thousand aunts and uncles and cousins because she would not be turned into their idea of what a nice little girl ought to be. It was as if the whole past were concentrated in the black figure of the old lady who had been the ring-leader, the viceroy, of all a far-flung tribe, an old woman who had been old even twenty years earlier, lying always on a sofa under a shawl, issuing her edicts, pouring out her ample sympathies, her bitter criticisms. And here she was, approaching briskly, as if the death of Mr. Struthers had somehow released her from bonds which had chafed for too long.
Watching her, one incident after another flashed through the quick, hard brain of Sabine, all recreated with a swift, astounding clarity—the day when she had run off to escape into the world and been found by old John Pentland hiding in the thicket of white birches happily eating blueberries. (She could see his countenance now, stern with its disapproval of such wild behavior, but softening, too, at the sight of the grubby, freckled plain face stained with blueberry juice.) And the return of the captive, when she was surrounded by aunts who dressed her in a clean frock and forced her to sit in the funereal spare bedroom with a New Testament on her knees until she “felt that she could come out and behave like a nice, well-brought-up little girl.” She could see the aunts pulling and fussing at her and saying, “What a shame she didn’t take after her mother in looks!” and, “She’ll have a hard time with such plain, straight red hair.”
And there was, too, the memory of that day when Anson Pentland, a timid, spiritless little Lord Fauntleroy of a boy, fell into the river and would have been drowned save for his cousin Sabine, who dragged him out, screaming and drenched, only to receive for herself all the scolding for having led him into mischief. And the times when she had been punished for having asked frank and simple questions which she ought not to have asked.
It was difficult to remember any happiness until the day when her father died and she was sent to New York, a girl of twenty, knowing very little of anything and nothing whatever of such things as love and marriage, to live with an uncle in a tall narrow house on Murray Hill. It was on that day (she saw it now with a devastating clarity as she stood watching the approach of Aunt Cassie) that her life had really begun. Until then her existence had been only a confused and tormented affair in which there was very little happiness. It was only later that reality had come to her, painfully, even tragically, in a whole procession of events which had made her slowly into this hard, worldly, cynical woman who found herself, without quite knowing why, back in a world she hated, standing at the window of Brook Cottage, a woman tormented by an immense and acutely living curiosity about people and the strange tangles which their lives sometimes assumed.
She had been standing by the window thinking back into the past with such a fierce intensity that she quite forgot the approach of Aunt Cassie and started suddenly at the sound of the curious, familiar thin voice, amazingly unchanged, calling from the hallway, “Sabine! Sabine dear! It’s your Aunt Cassie! Where are you?” as if she had never left Durham at all, as if nothing had changed in twenty years.
At sight of her, the old lady came forward with little fluttering cries to fling her arms about her late husband’s niece. Her manner was that of a shepherd receiving a lost sheep, a manner filled with forgiveness and pity and condescension. The tears welled easily into her eyes and streamed down her face.
Sabine permitted herself, frigidly, to be embraced, and said, “But you don’t look a day older, Aunt Cassie. You look stronger than ever.” It was a remark which somehow set the whole tone of the relationship between them, a remark which, though it sounded sympathetic and even complimentary, was a harsh thing to say to a woman who had cherished all her life the tradition of invalidism. It was harsh, too, because it was true. Aunt Cassie at forty-seven had been as shriveled and dried as she was now, twenty years later.
The old woman said, “My dear girl, I am miserable ... miserable.” And drying the tears that streamed down her face, she added, “It won’t be long now until I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine wanted suddenly to laugh, at the picture of Aunt Cassie entering Paradise to rejoin a husband whom she had always called, even in the intimacy of married life, “Mr. Struthers.” She kept thinking that Mr. Struthers might not find the reunion so pleasant as his wife anticipated. She had always held a strange belief that Mr. Struthers had chosen death as the best way out.
And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused by Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement. Aunt Cassie could never bring herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She must say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine said, “Oh, no.... Oh, no.... Don’t say that.”
“I don’t sleep any more. I barely close my eyes at night.”
She had seated herself now and was looking about her, absorbing everything in the room, the changes made by the dreadful O’Hara, the furniture he had bought for the house. But most of all she was studying Sabine, devouring her with sidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine, knowing her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent shock. She had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she had found instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman, superbly dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight red hair the aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin slippers—a woman who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand and subdued it, who was in a way complete.
“Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you.” And again the easy tears welled up.
(“Oh,” thought Sabine, “you don’t catch me that way. You won’t put me back where I once was. You won’t even have a chance to meddle in my life.”)
Aloud she said, “It’s a pity I’ve always been so far away.”
“But I’ve thought of you, my dear.... I’ve thought of you. Scarcely a night passes when I don’t say to myself before going to sleep, ‘There is poor Sabine out in the world, turning her back on all of us who love her.’” She sighed abysmally. “I have thought of you, dear. I’ve prayed for you in the long nights when I have never closed an eye.”
And Sabine, talking on half-mechanically, discovered slowly that, in spite of everything, she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie. She was no longer a shy, frightened, plain little girl; she even began to sense a challenge, a combat which filled her with a faint sense of warmth. She kept thinking, “She really hasn’t changed at all. She still wants to reach out and take possession of me and my life. She’s like an octopus reaching out and seizing each member of the family, arranging everything.” And she saw Aunt Cassie now, after so many years, in a new light. It seemed to her that there was something glittering and hard and a little sinister beneath all the sighing and tears and easy sympathy. Perhaps she (Sabine) was the only one in all the family who had escaped the reach of those subtle, insinuating tentacles.... She had run away.
Meanwhile Aunt Cassie had swept from a vivid and detailed description of the passing of Mr. Struthers into a catalogue of neighborhood and family calamities, of deaths, of broken troths, financial disasters, and the appearance on the horizon of the “dreadful O’Hara.” She reproached Sabine for having sold her land to such an outsider. And as she talked on and on she grew less and less human and more and more like some disembodied, impersonal force of nature. Sabine, watching her with piercing green eyes, found her a little terrifying. She had sharpened and hardened with age.
She discussed the divorces which had occurred in Boston, and at length, leaning forward and touching Sabine’s hand with her thin, nervous one, she said brokenly: “I felt for you in your trouble, Sabine. I never wrote you because it would have been so painful. I see now that I evaded my duty. But I felt for you.... I tried to put myself in your place. I tried to imagine dear Mr. Struthers being unfaithful to me ... but, of course, I couldn’t. He was a saint.” She blew her nose and repeated with passion, as if to herself, “A saint!”
(“Yes,” thought Sabine, “a saint ... if ever there was one.”) She saw that Aunt Cassie was attacking her now from a new point. She was trying to pity her. By being full of pity the old woman would try to break down her defenses and gain possession of her.
Sabine’s green eyes took one hard, glinting look. “Did you ever see my husband?” she asked.
“No,” said Aunt Cassie, “but I’ve heard a great deal of him. I’ve been told how you suffered.”
Sabine looked at her with a queer, mocking expression. “Then you’ve been told wrongly. He is a fascinating man. I did not suffer. I assure you that I would rather have shared him with fifty other women than have had any one of the men about here all to myself.”
There was a frank immorality in this statement which put Aunt Cassie to rout, bag and baggage. She merely stared, finding nothing to say in reply to such a speech. Clearly, in all her life she had never heard any one say a thing so bald and so frank, so completely naked of all pretense of gentility.
Sabine went on coldly, pushing her assault to the very end. “I divorced him at last, not because he was unfaithful to me, but because there was another woman who wanted to marry him ... a woman whom I respect and like ... a woman who is still my friend. Understand that I loved him passionately ... in a very fleshly way. One couldn’t help it. I wasn’t the only woman.... He was a kind of devil, but a very fascinating one.”
The old woman was a little stunned but not by any means defeated. Sabine saw a look come into her eyes, a look which clearly said, “So this is what the world has done to my poor, dear, innocent little Sabine!” At last she said with a sigh, “I find it an amazing world. I don’t know what it is coming to.”
“Nor I,” replied Sabine with an air of complete agreement and sympathy. She understood that the struggle was not yet finished, for Aunt Cassie had a way of putting herself always in an impregnable position, of wrapping herself in layer after layer of sighs and sympathy, of charity and forgiveness, of meekness and tears, so that in the end there was no way of suddenly tearing them aside and saying, “There you are ... naked at last, a horrible meddling old woman!” And Sabine kept thinking, too, that if Aunt Cassie had lived in the days of her witch-baiting ancestor, Preserved Pentland, she would have been burned for a witch.
And all the while Sabine had been suffering, quietly, deep inside, behind the frankly painted face ... suffering in a way which no one in the world had ever suspected; for it was like tearing out her heart, to talk thus of Richard Callendar, even to speak his name.
Aloud she said, “And how is Mrs. Pentland.... I mean Olivia ... not my cousin.... I know how she is ... no better.”
“No better.... It is one of those things which I can never understand.... Why God should have sent such a calamity to a good man like my brother.”
“But Olivia ...” began Sabine, putting an end abruptly to what was clearly the prelude to a pious monologue.
“Oh!... Olivia,” replied Aunt Cassie, launching into an account of the young Mrs. Pentland. “Olivia is an angel ... an angel, a blessing of God sent to my poor brother. But she’s not been well lately. She’s been rather sharp with me ... even with poor Miss Peavey, who is so sensitive. I can’t imagine what has come over her.”
It seemed that the strong, handsome Olivia was suffering from nerves. She was, Aunt Cassie said, unhappy about something, although she could not see why Olivia shouldn’t be happy ... a woman with everything in the world.
“Everything?” echoed Sabine. “Has any one in the world got everything?”
“It is Olivia’s fault if she hasn’t everything. All the materials are there. She has a good husband ... a husband who never looks at other women.”
“Nor at his own wife either,” interrupted Sabine. “I know all about Anson. I grew up with him.”
Aunt Cassie saw fit to ignore this. “She’s rich,” she said, resuming the catalogue of Olivia’s blessings.
And again Sabine interrupted, “But what does money mean Aunt Cassie? In our world one is rich and that’s the end of it. One takes it for granted. When one isn’t rich any longer, one simply slips out of it. It has very little to do with happiness....”
The strain was beginning to show on Aunt Cassie. “You’d find out if you weren’t rich,” she observed with asperity, “if your father and great-grandfather hadn’t taken care of their money.” She recovered herself and made a deprecating gesture. “But don’t think I’m criticizing dear Olivia. She is the best, the most wonderful woman.” She began to wrap herself once more in kindliness and charity and forgiveness. “Only she seems to me to be a little queer lately.”
Sabine’s artificially crimson mouth took on a slow smile. “It would be too bad if the Pentland family drove two wives insane—one after the other.”
Again Aunt Cassie came near to defeat by losing her composure. She snorted, and Sabine helped her out by asking: “And Anson?” ironically. “What is dear Anson doing?”
She told him of Anson’s great work, “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” and of its immense value as a contribution to the history of the nation; and when she had finished with that, she turned to Jack’s wretched health, saying in a low, melancholy voice, “It’s only a matter of time, you know.... At least, so the doctors say.... With a heart like that it’s only a matter of time.” The tears came again.
“And yet,” Sabine said slowly, “You say that Olivia has everything.”
“Well,” replied Aunt Cassie, “perhaps not everything.”
Before she left she inquired for Sabine’s daughter and was told that she had gone over to Pentlands to see Sybil.
“They went to the same school in France,” said Sabine. “They were friends there.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I was against Sybil’s going abroad to school. It fills a girl’s head with queer ideas ... especially a school like that where any one could go. Since she’s home, Sybil behaves very queerly.... I think it’ll stand in the way of her success in Boston. The boys don’t like girls who are different.”
“Perhaps,” said Sabine, “she may marry outside of Boston. Men aren’t the same everywhere. Even in Boston there must be one or two who don’t refer to women as ‘Good old So-and-so.’ Even in Boston there must be men who like women who are well dressed ... women who are ladies....”
Aunt Cassie began to grow angry again, but Sabine swept over her. “Don’t be insulted, Aunt Cassie. I only mean ladies in the old-fashioned, glamorous sense..... Besides,” she continued, “whom could she marry who wouldn’t be a cousin or a connection of some sort?”
“She ought to marry here ... among the people she’s always known. There’s a Mannering boy who would be a good match, and James Thorne’s youngest son.”
Sabine smiled. “So you have plans for her already. You’ve settled it?”
“Of course, nothing is settled. I’m only thinking of it with Sybil’s welfare in view. If she married one of those boys she’d know what she was getting. She’d know that she was marrying a gentleman.”
“Perhaps ...” said Sabine. “Perhaps.” Somehow a devil had taken possession of her and she added softly, “There was, of course, Horace Pentland.... One can never be quite sure.” (She never forgot anything, Sabine.)
And at the same moment she saw, standing outside the door that opened on the terrace next to the marshes, a solid, dark, heavy figure which she recognized with a sudden feeling of delight as O’Hara. He had been walking across the fields with the wiry little Higgins, who had left him and continued on his way down the lane in the direction of Pentlands. At the sight of him, Aunt Cassie made every sign of an attempt to escape quickly, but Sabine said in a voice ominous with sweetness, “You must meet Mr. O’Hara. I think you’ve never met him. He’s a charming man.” And she placed herself in such a position that it was impossible for the old woman to escape without losing every vestige of dignity.
Then Sabine called gently, “Come in, Mr. O’Hara.... Mrs. Struthers is here and wants so much to meet her new neighbor.”
The door opened and O’Hara stepped in, a swarthy, rather solidly built man of perhaps thirty-five, with a shapely head on which the vigorous black hair was cropped close, and with blue eyes that betrayed his Irish origin by the half-hidden sparkle of amusement at this move of Sabine’s. He had a strong jaw and full, rather sensual, lips and a curious sense of great physical strength, as if all his clothes were with difficulty modeled to the muscles that lay underneath. He wore no hat, and his skin was a dark tan, touched at the cheek-bones by the dull flush of health and good blood.
He was, one would have said at first sight, a common, vulgar man in that narrow-jawed world about Durham, a man, perhaps, who had come by his muscles as a dock-laborer. Sabine had thought him vulgar in the beginning, only to succumb in the end to a crude sort of power which placed him above the realm of such distinctions. And she was a shrewd woman, too, devoted passionately to the business of getting at the essence of people; she knew that vulgarity had nothing to do with a man who had eyes so shrewd and full of mockery.
He came forward quietly and with a charming air of deference in which there was a faint suspicion of nonsense, a curious shadow of vulgarity, only one could not be certain whether he was not being vulgar by deliberation.
“It is a great pleasure,” he said. “Of course, I have seen Mrs. Struthers many times ... at the horse shows ... the whippet races.”
Aunt Cassie was drawn up, stiff as a poker, with an air of having found herself unexpectedly face to face with a rattlesnake.
“I have had the same experience,” she said. “And of course I’ve seen all the improvements you have made here on the farm.” The word “improvements” she spoke with a sort of venom in it, as if it had been instead a word like “arson.”
“We’ll have some tea,” observed Sabine. “Sit down, Aunt Cassie.”
But Aunt Cassie did not unbend. “I promised Olivia to be back at Pentlands for tea,” she said. “And I am late already.” Pulling on her black gloves, she made a sudden dip in the direction of O’Hara. “We shall probably see each other again, Mr. O’Hara, since we are neighbors.”
“Indeed, I hope so....”
Then she kissed Sabine again and murmured, “I hope, my dear, that you will come often to see me, now that you’ve come back to us. Make my house your own home.” She turned to O’Hara, finding a use for him suddenly in her warfare against Sabine. “You know, Mr. O’Hara, she is a traitor, in her way. She was raised among us and then went away for twenty years. She hasn’t any loyalty in her.”
She made the speech with a stiff air of playfulness, as if, of course, she were only making a joke and the speech meant nothing at all. Yet the air was filled with a cloud of implications. It was the sort of tactics in which she excelled.
Sabine went with her to the door, and when she returned she discovered O’Hara standing by the window, watching the figure of Aunt Cassie as she moved indignantly down the road in the direction of Pentlands. Sabine stood there for a moment, studying the straight, strong figure outlined against the light, and she got suddenly a curious sense of the enmity between him and the old woman. They stood, the two of them, in a strange way as the symbols of two great forces—the one negative, the other intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of decay, the other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever reconcile them. According to the scheme of things, they would be implacable enemies to the end. But Sabine had no doubts as to the final victor; the same scheme of things showed small respect for all that Aunt Cassie stood for. That was one of the wisdoms Sabine had learned since she had escaped from Durham into the uncompromising realities of the great world.
When she spoke, she said in a noncommittal sort of voice, “Mrs. Struthers is a remarkable woman.”
And O’Hara, turning, looked at her with a sudden glint of humor in his blue eyes. “Extraordinary ... I’m sure of it.”
“And a powerful woman,” said Sabine. “Wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove. It is never good to underestimate such strength. And now.... How do you like your tea?”
He took no tea but contented himself with munching a bit of toast and afterward smoking a cigar, clearly pleased with himself in a naïve way in the rôle of landlord coming to inquire of his tenant whether everything was satisfactory. He had a liking for this hard, clever woman who was now only a tenant of the land—his land—which she had once owned. When he thought of it—that he, Michael O’Hara, had come to own this farm in the midst of the fashionable and dignified world of Durham—there was something incredible in the knowledge, something which never ceased to warm him with a strong sense of satisfaction. By merely turning his head, he could see in the mirror the reflection of the long scar on his temple, marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a youthful fight along the India Wharf. He, Michael O’Hara, without education save that which he had given himself, without money, without influence, had raised himself to this position before his thirty-sixth birthday. In the autumn he would be a candidate for Congress, certain of election in the back Irish districts. He, Michael O’Hara, was on his way to being one of the great men of New England, a country which had once been the tight little paradise of people like the Pentlands.
Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.
Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a microscope. She was finding out all about him; and he understood that, for it was a trick in which he, himself, was well-practised. It was by such methods that he had got ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too, that she should have come out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could be so utterly different from it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since ... that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.
They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of understanding unusual in two people who had known each other for so short a time; they spoke of the farm, of Pentlands, of the mills and the Poles in Durham, of the country as it had been in the days when Sabine was a child. And all the while he had that sense of her weighing and watching him, of feeling out the faint echo of a brogue in his speech and the rather hard, nasal quality that remained from those days along India Wharf and the memories of a ne’er-do-well, superstitious Irish father.
He could not have known that she was a woman who included among her friends men and women of a dozen nationalities, who lived a life among the clever, successful people of the world ... the architects, the painters, the politicians, the scientists. He could not have known the ruthless rule she put up against tolerating any but people who were “complete.” He could have known nothing of her other life in Paris, and London, and New York, which had nothing to do with the life in Durham and Boston. And yet he did know.... He saw that, despite the great difference in their worlds, there was a certain kinship between them, that they had both come to look upon the world as a pie from which any plum might be drawn if one only knew the knack.
And Sabine, on her side, not yet quite certain about casting aside all barriers, was slowly reaching the same understanding. There was no love or sentimentality in the spark that flashed between them. She was more than ten years older than O’Hara and had done with such things long ago. It was merely a recognition of one strong person by another.
It was O’Hara who first took advantage of the bond. In the midst of the conversation, he had turned the talk rather abruptly to Pentlands.
“I’ve never been there and I know very little of the life,” he said, “but I’ve watched it from a distance and it interests me. It’s like something out of a dream, completely dead ... dead all save for young Mrs. Pentland and Sybil.”
Sabine smiled. “You know Sybil, then?”
“We ride together every morning.... We met one morning by chance along the path by the river and since then we’ve gone nearly every day.”
“She’s a charming girl.... She went to school in France with my daughter, Thérèse. I saw a great deal of her then.”
Far back in her mind the thought occurred to her that there would be something very amusing in the prospect of Sybil married to O’Hara. It would produce such an uproar with Anson and Aunt Cassie and the other relatives.... A Pentland married to an Irish Roman Catholic politician!
“She is like her mother, isn’t she?” asked O’Hara, sitting forward a bit on his chair. He had a way of sitting thus, in the tense, quiet alertness of a cat.
“Very like her mother.... Her mother is a remarkable woman ... a charming woman ... also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things, a really good and generous woman.”
“I’ve thought that.... I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to help me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she had a passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse ... though she scarcely knew me. She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to know her. But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I haven’t seen her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me. Sometimes I feel sorry for her.... It must be a queer life for a woman like that ... young and beautiful.”
“She has a great deal to occupy her at Pentlands. And it’s true that it’s not a very fascinating life. Still, I’m sure she couldn’t bear being pitied.... She’s the last woman in the world to want pity.”
Curiously, O’Hara flushed, the red mounting slowly beneath the dark-tanned skin.
“I thought,” he said a little sadly, “that her husband or Mrs. Struthers might have raised objections.... I know how they feel toward me. There’s no use pretending not to know.”
“It is quite possible,” said Sabine.
There was a sudden embarrassing silence, which gave Sabine time to pull her wits together and organize a thousand sudden thoughts and impressions. She was beginning to understand, bit by bit, the real reasons of their hatred for O’Hara, the reasons which lay deep down underneath, perhaps so deep that none of them ever saw them for what they were.
And then out of the silence she heard the voice of O’Hara saying, in a queer, hushed way, “I mean to ask something of you ... something that may sound ridiculous. I don’t pretend that it isn’t, but I mean to ask it anyway.”
For a moment he hesitated and then, rising quickly, he stood looking away from her out of the door, toward the distant blue marshes and the open sea. She fancied that he was trembling a little, but she could not be certain. What she did know was that he made an immense and heroic effort, that for a moment he, a man who never did such things, placed himself in a position where he would be defenseless and open to being cruelly hurt; and for the moment all the recklessness seemed to flow out of him and in its place there came a queer sadness, almost as if he felt himself defeated in some way....
He said, “What I mean to ask you is this.... Will you ask me sometimes here to the cottage when she will be here too?” He turned toward her suddenly and added, “It will mean a great deal to me ... more than you can imagine.”
She did not answer him at once, but sat watching him with a poorly concealed intensity; and presently, flicking the cigarette ashes casually from her gown, she asked, “And do you think it would be quite moral of me?”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her in astonishment, as if he had expected her, least of all people in the world, to ask such a thing.
“It might,” he said, “make us both a great deal happier.”
“Perhaps ... perhaps not. It’s not so simple as that. Besides, it isn’t happiness that one places first at Pentlands.”
“No.... Still....” He made a sudden vigorous gesture, as if to sweep aside all objections.
“You’re a queer man.... I’ll see what can be done.”
He thanked her and went out shyly without another word, to stride across the meadows, his black head bent thoughtfully, in the direction of his new bright chimneys. At his heels trotted the springer, which had lain waiting for him outside the door. There was something about the robust figure, crossing the old meadow through the blue twilight, that carried a note of lonely sadness. The self-confidence, the assurance, seemed to have melted away in some mysterious fashion. It was almost as if one man had entered the cottage a little while before and another, a quite different man, had left it just now. Only one thing, Sabine saw, could have made the difference, and that was the name of Olivia.
When he had disappeared Sabine went up to her room overlooking the sea and lay there for a long time thinking. She was by nature an indolent woman, especially at times when her brain worked with a fierce activity. It was working thus now, in a kind of fever, confused and yet tremendously clear; for the visits from Aunt Cassie and O’Hara had ignited her almost morbid passion for vicarious experience. She had a sense of being on the brink of some calamity which, beginning long ago in a hopeless tangle of origins and motives, was ready now to break forth with the accumulated force of years.
It was only now that she began to understand a little what it was that had drawn her back to a place which held memories so unhappy as those haunting the whole countryside of Durham. She saw that it must have been all the while a desire for vindication, a hunger to show them that, in spite of everything, of the straight red hair and the plain face, the silly ideas with which they had filled her head, in spite even of her unhappiness over her husband, she had made of her life a successful, even a brilliant, affair. She had wanted to show them that she stood aloof now and impregnable, quite beyond their power to curb or to injure her. And for a moment she suspected that the half-discerned motive was an even stronger thing, akin perhaps to a desire for vengeance; for she held this world about Durham responsible for the ruin of her happiness. She knew now, as a worldly woman of forty-six, that if she had been brought up knowing life for what it was, she might never have lost the one man who had ever roused a genuine passion in a nature so hard and dry.
It was all confused and tormented and vague, yet the visit of Aunt Cassie, filled with implications and veiled attempts to humble her, had cleared the air enormously.
And behind the closed lids, the green eyes began to see a whole procession of calamities which lay perhaps within her power to create. She began to see how it might even be possible to bring the whole world of Pentlands down about their heads in a collapse which could create only freedom and happiness to Olivia and her daughter. And it was these two alone for whom she had any affection; the others might be damned, gloriously damned, while she stood by without raising a finger.
She began to see where the pieces of the puzzle lay, the wedges which might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world that once more surrounded her.
Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of power, of having all the tools at hand, of being the dea ex machinâ of the calamity.
She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the end even money could not save them. There came a time when a great fortune might be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.
She was still lying there when Thérèse came in—a short, plain, rather stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead. She was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired unhappy little girl had been so many times in that far-off, half-forgotten childhood.
“Where have you been?” she asked indifferently, for there was always a curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.
“Catching frogs to dissect,” said Thérèse. “They’re damned scarce and I slipped into the river.”
Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance of marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found satisfaction in the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse’s life so that no one could ever hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer nomadic life they had led together, meeting all sorts of men and women who were, in Sabine’s curious sense of the word, “complete,” the girl had pierced her way somehow to the bottom of things. She was building her young life upon a rock, so that she could afford to feel contempt for the very forces which long ago had hurt her mother. She might, like O’Hara, be suddenly humbled by love; but that, Sabine knew, was a glorious thing well worth suffering.
She knew it each time that she looked at her child and saw the clear gray eyes of the girl’s father looking out of the dark face with the same proud look of indifferent confidence which had fascinated her twenty years ago. So long as Thérèse was alive, she would never be able wholly to forget him.
“Go wash yourself,” she said. “Old Mr. Pentland and Olivia and Mrs. Soames are coming to dine and play bridge.”
As she dressed for dinner she no longer asked herself, “Why did I ever imagine Thérèse might find a husband here? What ever induced me to come back here to be bored all summer long?”
She had forgotten all that. She began to see that the summer held prospects of diversion. It might even turn into a fascinating game. She knew that her return had nothing to do with Thérèse’s future; she had been drawn back into Durham by some vague but overwhelming desire for mischief.