And then into the midst of her triumph came the worst that could have happened. Olivia was the first to learn of the calamity as she always came to know before any of the others knowledge which old John Pentland possessed; and the others would never have known until the sad business of the funeral was over save for Aunt Cassie’s implacable curiosity.
On the second day, Olivia, summoned by her father-in-law to come to the library, found him there as she had found him so many times before, grim and silent and repressed, only this time there was something inexpressibly tragic and broken in his manner.
She did not speak to him; she simply waited until, looking up at last, he said almost in a whisper, “Horace Pentland’s body is at the Durham station.”
And he looked at her with the quick, pitiful helplessness of a strong man who has suddenly grown weak and old, as if at last he had come to the end of his strength and was turning now to her. It was then for the first time that she began to see how she was in a way a prisoner, that from now on, as one day passed into another, the whole life at Pentlands would come to be more and more her affair. There was no one to take the place of the old man ... no one, save herself.
“What shall we do?” he asked in the same low voice. “I don’t know. I am nearly at the end of things.”
“We could bury them together,” said Olivia softly. “We could have a double funeral.”
He looked at her in astonishment. “You wouldn’t mind that?” and when she shook her head in answer, he replied: “But we can’t do it. There seems to me something wrong in such an idea.... I can’t explain what I mean.... It oughtn’t to be done.... A boy like Jack and an old reprobate like Horace.”
They would have settled it quietly between them as they had settled so many troubles in the last years when John Pentland had come to her for strength, but at that moment the door opened suddenly and, without knocking, Aunt Cassie appeared, her eyes really blazing with an angry, hysterical light, her hair all hanging in little iron-gray wisps about her narrow face.
“What is it?” she asked. “What has gone wrong? I know there’s something, and you’ve no right to keep it from me.” She was shrill and brittle, as if in those two days all the pleasure and activity surrounding death had driven her into an orgy of excitement. At the sound of her voice, both Olivia and John Pentland started abruptly. She had touched them on nerves raw and worn.
The thin, high-pitched voice went on. “I’ve given up all my time to arranging things. I’ve barely slept. I sacrifice myself to you all day and night and I’ve a right to know.” It was as if she had sensed the slow breaking up of the old man and sought now to hurl him aside, to depose him as head of the family, in one great coup d’état, setting herself up there in his place, a thin, fiercely intolerant tyrant; as if at last she had given up her old subtle way of trying to gain her ends by intrigue through the men of the family. She stood ready now to set up a matriarchy, the last refuge of a family whose strength was gone. She had risen thus in the same way once before within the memory of Olivia, in those long months when Mr. Struthers, fading slowly into death, yielded her the victory.