Olivia displayed an interest by saying, “Was that what you wrote to the Transcript about?”
“Yes ... and I was sure that the genealogical editor was wrong. See ... here it is in one of Jared Pentland’s letters at the time she was drowned.... Jared was her husband.... He refers to Toby Cane as her only male first cousin.”
“That will help you a great deal,” said Olivia, “won’t it?”
“It will help clear up the chapter about the origins of her family.” And then, after a little pause, “I wish that I could get some trace of the correspondence between Savina Pentland and Cane. I’m sure it would be full of things ... but it seems not to exist ... only one or two letters which tell nothing.”
And then he relapsed again into a complete and passionate silence, lost in the rustle of old books and yellowed letters, leaving the legend of Savina Pentland to take possession of the others in the room.
The memory of this woman had a way of stealing in upon the family unaware, quite without their willing it. She was always there in the house, more lively than any of the more sober ancestors, perhaps because of them all she alone had been touched by splendor; she alone had been in her reckless way a great lady. There was a power in her recklessness and extravagance which came, in the end, to obscure all those other plain, solemn-faced, thrifty wives whose portraits adorned the hall of Pentlands, much as a rising sun extinguishes the feeble light of the stars. And about her obscure origin there clung a perpetual aura of romance, since there was no one to know just who her mother was or exactly whence she came. The mother was born perhaps of stock no humbler than the first shopkeeping Pentland to land on the Cape, but there was in her the dark taint of Portuguese blood; some said that she was the daughter of a fisherman. And Savina herself had possessed enough of fascination to lure a cautious Pentland into eloping with her against the scruples that were a very fiber of the Pentland bones and flesh.
The portrait of Savina Pentland stood forth among the others in the white hall, fascinating and beautiful not only because the subject was a dark, handsome woman, but because it had been done by Ingres in Rome during the years when he made portraits of tourists to save himself from starvation. It was the likeness of a small but voluptuous woman with great wanton dark eyes and smooth black hair pulled back from a camellia-white brow and done in a little knot on the nape of the white neck—a woman who looked out of the old picture with the flashing, spirited glance of one who lived boldly and passionately. She wore a gown of peach-colored velvet ornamented with the famous parure of pearls and emeralds given her, to the scandal of a thrifty family, by the infatuated Jared Pentland. Passing the long gallery of portraits in the hallway it was always Savina Pentland whom one noticed. She reigned there as she must have reigned in life, so bold and splendorous as to seem a bit vulgar, especially in a world of such sober folk, yet so beautiful and so spirited that she made all the others seem scarcely worth consideration.
Even in death she had remained an “outsider,” for she was the only one of the family who did not rest quietly among the stunted trees at the top of the bald hill where the first Pentlands had laid their dead. All that was left of the warm, soft body lay in the white sand at the bottom of the ocean within sight of Pentlands. It was as if fate had delivered her in death into a grave as tempestuous and violent as she had been in life. And somewhere near her in the restless white sand lay Toby Cane, with whom she had gone sailing one bright summer day when a sudden squall turned a gay excursion into a tragedy.
Even Aunt Cassie, who distrusted any woman with gaze so bold and free as that set down by the brush of Ingres—even Aunt Cassie could not annihilate the glamour of Savina’s legend. For her there was, too, another, more painful, memory hidden in the knowledge that the parure of pearls and emeralds and all the other jewels which Savina Pentland had wrung from her thrifty husband, lay buried somewhere in the white sand between her bones and those of her cousin. To Aunt Cassie Savina Pentland seemed more than merely a reckless, extravagant creature. She was an enemy of the Pentland fortune and of all the virtues of the family.
The family portraits were of great value to Anson in compiling his book, for they represented the most complete collection of ancestors existing in all America. From the portrait of the emigrating Pentland, painted in a wooden manner by some traveling painter of tavern signs, to the rather handsome one of John Pentland, painted at middle-age in a pink coat by Sargent, and the rather bad and liverish one of Anson, also by Mr. Sargent, the collection was complete save for two—the weak Jared Pentland who had married Savina, and the Pentland between old John’s father and the clipper-ship owner, who had died at twenty-three, a disgraceful thing for any Pentland to have done.