John Pentland sighed, profoundly, wearily, and murmured, “It’s nothing, Cassie. It would only trouble you. Olivia and I are settling it.”
But she did not retreat. Standing there, she held her ground and continued the tirade, working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. “I won’t be put aside. No one ever tells me anything. For years now I’ve been shut out as if I were half-witted. Frail as I am, I work myself to the bone for the family and don’t even get a word of thanks.... Why is Olivia always preferred to your own sister?” And tears of luxurious, sensual, self-pity began to stream down her withered face. She began even to mumble and mix her words, and she abandoned herself completely to the fleshly pleasure of hysterics.
Olivia, watching her quietly, saw that this was no usual occasion. This was, in truth, the new Aunt Cassie whom Sabine had revealed to her a few days before ... the aggressively virginal Aunt Cassie who had been born in that moment on the terrace to take the place of the old Aunt Cassie who had existed always in an aura of tears and good works and sympathy. She understood now what she had never understood before—that Aunt Cassie was not merely an irrational hypochondriac, a harmless, pitiful creature, but a ruthless and unscrupulous force. She knew that behind this emotional debauch there lay some deeply conceived plan. Vaguely she suspected that the plan was aimed at subduing herself, or bringing her (Olivia) completely under the will of the old woman. It was the insect again beating its wings frantically against the windows of a world which she could never enter....
And softly Olivia said, “Surely, Aunt Cassie, there is no need to make a scene ... there’s no need to be vulgar ... at a time like this.”
The old woman, suddenly speechless, looked at her brother, but from him there came no sign of aid or succor; she must have seen, plainly, that he had placed himself on the side of Olivia ... the outsider, who had dared to accuse a Pentland of being vulgar.
“You heard what she said, John.... You heard what she said! She called your sister vulgar!” But her hysterical mood began to abate suddenly, as if she saw that she had chosen, after all, the wrong plan of attack. Olivia did not answer her. She only sat there, looking pale and patient and beautiful in her black clothes, waiting. It was a moment unfair to Aunt Cassie. No man, even Anson, would have placed himself against Olivia just then.
“If you must know, Cassie ...” the old man said slowly. “It’s a thing you won’t want to hear. But if you must know, it is simply that Horace Pentland’s body is at the station in Durham.”
Olivia had a quick sense of the whited sepulcher beginning to crack, to fall slowly into bits.
At first Aunt Cassie only stared at them, snuffling and wiping her red eyes, and then she said, in an amazingly calm voice, “You see.... You never tell me anything. I never knew he was dead.” There was a touch of triumph and vindication in her manner.
“There was no need of telling you, Cassie,” said the old man. “You wouldn’t let his name be spoken in the family for years. It was you—you and Anson—who made me threaten him into living abroad. Why should you care when he died?”