She was not even annoyed any longer by the tiresome daily visits of Aunt Cassie, nor by the old woman’s passion for pitying her and making wild insinuations against Sabine and O’Hara and complaining of Sybil riding with him in the mornings over the dew-covered fields. She was able now simply to sit there politely as she had once done, listening while the old woman talked on and on; only now she did not even listen with attention. It seemed to her at times that Aunt Cassie was like some insect beating itself frantically against a pane of glass, trying over and over again with an unflagging futility to enter where it was impossible to enter.
It was Sabine who gave her a sudden glimpse of penetration into this instinct about Aunt Cassie, Sabine who spent all her time finding out about people. It happened one morning that the two clouds of dust, the one made by Aunt Cassie and the other by Sabine, met at the very foot of the long drive leading up to Pentlands, and together the two women—one dressed severely in shabby black, without so much as a fleck of powder on her nose, the other dressed expensively in what some Paris dressmaker chose to call a costume de sport, with her face made up like a Parisian—arrived together to sit on the piazza of Pentlands insulting each other subtly for an hour. When at last Sabine managed to outstay Aunt Cassie (it was always a contest between them, for each knew that the other would attack her as soon as she was out of hearing) she turned to Olivia and said abruptly, “I’ve been thinking about Aunt Cassie, and I’m sure now of one thing. Aunt Cassie is a virgin!”
There was something so cold-blooded and sudden in the statement that Olivia laughed.
“I’m sure of it,” persisted Sabine with quiet seriousness. “Look at her. She’s always talking about the tragedy of her being too frail ever to have had children. She never tried. That’s the answer. She never tried.” Sabine tossed away what remained of the cigarette she had lighted to annoy Aunt Cassie, and continued. “You never knew my Uncle Ned Struthers when he was young. You only knew him as an old man with no spirit left. But he wasn’t that way always. It’s what she did to him. She destroyed him. He was a full-blooded kind of man who liked drinking and horses and he must have liked women, too, but she cured him of that. He would have liked children, but instead of a wife he only got a woman who couldn’t bear the thought of not being married and yet couldn’t bear what marriage meant. He got a creature who fainted and wept and lay on a sofa all day, who got the better of him because he was a nice, stupid, chivalrous fellow.”
Sabine was launched now with all the passion which seized her when she had laid bare a little patch of life and examined it minutely.
“He didn’t even dare to be unfaithful to her. If he looked at another woman she fainted and became deathly ill and made terrible scenes. I can remember some of them. I remember that once he called on Mrs. Soames when she was young and beautiful, and when he came home Aunt Cassie met him in hysterics and told him that if it ever happened again she would go out, ‘frail and miserable as she was,’ and commit adultery. I remember the story because I overheard my father telling it when I was a child and I was miserable until I found out what ‘committing adultery’ meant. In the end she destroyed him. I’m sure of it.”
Sabine sat there, with a face like stone, following with her eyes the cloud of dust that moved along the lane as Aunt Cassie progressed on her morning round of visits, a symbol in a way of all the forces that had warped her own existence.
“It’s possible,” murmured Olivia.
Sabine turned toward her with a quick, sudden movement. “That’s why she is always so concerned with the lives of other people. She has never had any life of her own, never. She’s always been afraid. It’s why she loves the calamities of other people, because she’s never had any of her own. Not even her husband’s death was a calamity. It left her free, completely free of troubles as she had always wanted to be.”
And then a strange thing happened to Olivia. It was as if a new Aunt Cassie had been born, as if the old one, so full of tears and easy sympathy who always appeared miraculously when there was a calamity in the neighborhood, the Aunt Cassie who was famous for her good works and her tears and words of religious counsel, had gone down the lane for the last time, never to return again. To-morrow morning a new Aunt Cassie would arrive, one who outwardly would be the same; only to Olivia she would be different, a woman stripped of all those veils of pretense and emotions with which she wrapped herself, an old woman naked in her ugliness who, Olivia understood in a blinding flash of clarity, was like an insect battering itself against a pane of glass in a futile attempt to enter where it was impossible for her ever to enter. And she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie now. She did not even dislike her; she only pitied the old woman because she had missed so much, because she would die without ever having lived. And she must have been young and handsome once, and very amusing. There were still moments when the old lady’s charm and humor and sharp tongue were completely disarming.