He was silent to-day, in one of the black moods which Olivia knew well meant that he was troubled. She knew that this time it had nothing to do with Jack’s illness, for the boy sat there opposite them, looking stronger than he had looked in months ... blond and pale and thin, with the blue veins showing at his pathetic wrists and on his thin, handsome temples.
Olivia had lived through bad times over Jack and she had lived through them always together with John Pentland, so there had grown up between them—the mother and the grandfather—a sense of understanding which was quite beyond speech. Together they had spent so many nights by the side of the boy, keeping him alive almost by the strength of their united wills, forcing him to live when, gasping for life, he would have slipped away easily into death. Together they had kept him in life, because they both loved him and because he was the last son of the family.
Olivia felt sometimes that Sybil, too, played a part in the never-ending struggle against death. The girl, like her grandfather, never spoke of such things, but one could read them in the troubled depths of her violet eyes. That long, weary struggle was one of the tragedies they never spoke of at Pentlands, leaving it buried in silence. One said, “Jack looks well to-day,” smiling, and, “Perhaps the doctors are wrong.” Sybil was watching her brother now, in that quiet, mysterious way she had, watching him cautiously lest he discover that she was watching; for he discovered troubles easily, with the kind of clairvoyance which comes to people who have always been ill.
They barely talked at all during the lunch. Sybil planned to take her brother in the trap to ride over the farm and down to the white dunes.
“Higgins is going with us,” she said. “He’s going to show us the new litter of foxes in the black thicket.”
And Jack said, “It’s a funny thing about Higgins. He always discovers such things before any one else. He knows when it will be a good day for fishing and just when it is going to rain. He’s never wrong.”
“No ...” said the grandfather suddenly. “It’s a funny thing. He’s never wrong ... not in all the years I’ve known him.”
It was the only time he said anything during the meal, and Olivia, trying to fill in the gaps in the conversation, found it difficult, with the boy sitting opposite her looking so pale and ill. It seemed to her sometimes that he had never really been born, that he had always remained in some way a part of herself. When he was out of her sight, she had no peace because there was always a gnawing terror that she might never see him again. And she knew that deep inside the frail body there was a spirit, a flame, descended from the old man and from herself, which burned passionately with a desire for life, for riding, for swimming, for running across the open meadows ... a flame that must always be smothered. If only he had been like Anson, his father, who never knew that hunger for life....
“Olivia, my dear....” The old man was speaking. “Will you have your coffee with me in the library? There is something I want to discuss with you.”
She knew it then. She had been right. There was something which troubled him. He always said the same thing when he was faced by some problem too heavy for his old shoulders. He always said, “Olivia, my dear.... Will you come into the library?” He never summoned his own son, or his sister Cassie ... no one but Olivia. Between them they shared secrets which the others never dreamed of; and when he died, all the troubles would be hers ... they would be passed on for her to deal with ... those troubles which existed in a family which the world would have said was rich and respected and quite without troubles.