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.