Olivia could not help smiling. “It’s called I’m in love again and the spring is a-comin’. Jean brought it back from Paris. A friend of his wrote it ... but names don’t mean anything in music any more. No one listens to the words.”
A shadow of amusement crossed his face. “Songs have queer names nowadays.”
She would have escaped, then, going quietly away. She stirred and even made a gesture toward leaving, but he raised his hand in the way he had, making her feel that she must obey him as if she were a child.
“There are one or two more things you ought to know, Olivia ... things that will help you to understand. Some one has to know them. Some one....” He halted abruptly and again made a great effort to go on. The veins stood out sharply on the bony head.
“It’s about her chiefly,” he said, with the inevitable gesture toward the north wing. “She wasn’t always that way. That’s what I want to explain. You see ... we were married when we were both very young. It was my father who wanted it. I was twenty and she was eighteen. My father had known her family always. They were cousins of ours, in a way, just as they were cousins of Sabine’s. He had gone to school with her father and they belonged to the same club and she was an only child with a prospect of coming into a great fortune. It’s an old story, you see, but a rather common one in our world.... All these things counted, and as for myself, I’d never had anything to do with women and I’d never been in love with any one. I was very young. I think they saw it as a perfect match ... made in the hard, prosperous Heaven of their dreams. She was very pretty ... you can see even now that she must have been very pretty.... She was sweet, too, and innocent.” He coughed, and continued with a great effort. “She had ... she had a mind like a little child’s. She knew nothing ... a flower of innocence,” he added with a strange savagery.
And then, as if the effort were too much for him, he paused and sat staring out of the window toward the sea. To Olivia it seemed that he had slipped back across the years to the time when the poor old lady had been young and perhaps curiously shy of his ardent wooing. A silence settled again over the room, so profound that this time the faint, distant roaring of the surf on the rocks became audible, and then again the sound of Jean’s music breaking in upon them. He was playing another tune ... not I’m in love again, but one called Ukulele Lady.
“I wish they’d stop that damned music!” said John Pentland.
“I’ll go,” began Olivia, rising.
“No ... don’t go. You mustn’t go ... not now.” He seemed anxious, almost terrified, perhaps by the fear that if he did not tell now he would never tell her the long story that he must tell to some one. “No, don’t go ... not until I’ve finished, Olivia. I must finish.... I want you to know why such things happened as happened here yesterday and the day before in this room.... There’s no excuse, but what I have to tell you may explain it ... a little.”
He rose and opening one of the bookcases, took out a bottle of whisky. Looking at her, he said, “Don’t worry, Olivia, I shan’t repeat it. It’s only that I’m feeling weak. It will never happen again ... what happened yesterday ... never. I give you my word.”