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.’”