[Chapter I, ] [Chapter II]
[Chapter III, ] [Chapter IV, ] [Chapter V, ] [Chapter VI, ] [Chapter VII, ] [Chapter VIII, ] [Chapter IX, ] [Chapter X. ]

Louis Bromfield

EARLY AUTUMN

Copyright, 1926, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved
FOR
LAURA CANFIELD WOOD

EARLY AUTUMN

CHAPTER I

1

There was a ball in the old Pentland house because for the first time in nearly forty years there was a young girl in the family to be introduced to the polite world of Boston and to the elect who had been asked to come on from New York and Philadelphia. So the old house was all bedizened with lanterns and bunches of late spring flowers, and in the bare, white-painted, dignified hallway a negro band, hidden discreetly by flowers, sat making noisy, obscene music.

Sybil Pentland was eighteen and lately returned from School in Paris, whither she had been sent against the advice of the conservative members of her own family, which, it might have been said, included in its connections most of Boston. Already her great-aunt, Mrs. Cassandra Struthers, a formidable woman, had gone through the list of eligible young men—the cousins and connections who were presentable and possessed of fortunes worthy of consideration by a family so solidly rich as the Pentlands. It was toward this end that the ball had been launched and the whole countryside invited, young and old, spry and infirm, middle-aged and dowdy—toward this end and with the idea of showing the world that the family had lost none of its prestige for all the lack of young people in its ranks. For this prestige had once been of national proportions, though now it had shrunk until the Pentland name was little known outside New England. Rather, it might have been said that the nation had run away from New England and the Pentland family, leaving it stranded and almost forgotten by the side of the path which marked an unruly, almost barbaric progress away from all that the Pentland family and the old house represented.

Sybil’s grandfather had seen to it that there was plenty of champagne; and there were tables piled with salads and cold lobster and sandwiches and hot chicken in chafing-dishes. It was as if a family whose whole history had been marked by thrift and caution had suddenly cast to the winds all semblance of restraint in a heroic gesture toward splendor.

But in some way, the gesture seemed to be failing. The negro music sounded wild and spirited, but also indiscreet and out of place in a house so old and solemn. A few men and one or two women known for their fondness for drink consumed a great deal of champagne, but only dulness came of it, dulness and a kind of dead despair. The rich, the splendorous, the gorgeous, the barbaric, had no place in rooms where the kind Mr. Longfellow and the immortal Messrs. Emerson and Lowell had once sat and talked of life. In a hallway, beneath the gaze of a row of ancestors remarkable for the grimness of their faces, the music appeared to lose its quality of abandon; it did not belong in this genteel world. On the fringes of the party there was some drunkenness among the undergraduates imported from Cambridge, but there was very little gaiety. The champagne fell upon barren ground. The party drooped.

Though the affair was given primarily to place Sybil Pentland upon the matrimonial market of this compact world, it served, too, as an introduction for Thérèse Callendar, who had come to spend the summer at Brook Cottage across the stony meadows on the other side of the river from Pentlands; and as a reintroduction of her mother, a far more vivid and remarkable person. Durham and the countryside thereabouts was familiar enough to her, for she had been born there and passed her childhood within sight of the spire of the Durham town meeting-house. And now, after an absence of twenty years, she had come back out of a world which her own people—the people of her childhood—considered strange and ungenteel. Her world was one filled with queer people, a world remote from the quiet old house at Pentlands and the great brownstone houses of Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Street. Indeed, it was this woman, Sabine Callendar, who seemed to have stolen all the thunder at the ball; beside her, neither of the young girls, her own daughter nor Sybil Pentland, appeared to attract any great interest. It was Sabine whom every one noticed, acquaintances of her childhood because they were devoured by curiosity concerning those missing twenty years, and strangers because she was the most picturesque and arresting figure at the ball.

It was not that she surrounded herself by adoring young men eager to dance with her. She was, after all, a woman of forty-six, and she had no tolerance for mooning boys whose conversation was limited to bootlegging and college clubs. It was a success of a singular sort, a triumph of indifference.

People like Aunt Cassie Struthers remembered her as a shy and awkward young girl with a plain face, a good figure and brick-red hair which twenty years ago had been spoken of as “Poor Sabine’s ugly red hair.” She was a girl in those days who suffered miserably at balls and dinners, who shrank from all social life and preferred solitude. And now, here she was—returned—a tall woman of forty-six, with the same splendid figure, the same long nose and green eyes set a trifle too near each other, but a woman so striking in appearance and the confidence of her bearing that she managed somehow to dim the success even of younger, prettier women and virtually to extinguish the embryonic young things in pink-and-white tulle. Moving about indolently from room to room, greeting the people who had known her as a girl, addressing here and there an acquaintance which she had made in the course of the queer, independent, nomadic life she had led since divorcing her husband, there was an arrogance in her very walk that frightened the young and produced in the older members of Durham community (all the cousins and connections and indefinable relatives), a sense of profound irritation. Once she had been one of them, and now she seemed completely independent of them all, a traitress who had flung to the winds all the little rules of life drilled into her by Aunt Cassie and other aunts and cousins in the days when she had been an awkward, homely little girl with shocking red hair. Once she had belonged to this tight little world, and now she had returned—a woman who should have been defeated and a little declassée and somehow, irritatingly, was not. Instead, she was a “figure” much sought after in the world, enveloped by the mysterious cloud of esteem which surrounds such persons—a woman, in short, who was able to pick her friends from the ranks of distinguished and even celebrated people. It was not only because this was true, but because people like Aunt Cassie knew it was true, that she aroused interest and even indignation. She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even a glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven.

As she moved through the big rooms—complete and perfect from her superbly done, burnished red hair to the tips of her silver slippers—there was about her an assurance and an air of confidence in her own perfection that bordered upon insolence. There was a hard radiance and beauty in the brilliant green dress and the thin chain of diamonds that dimmed all of the others, that made most of the women seem dowdy and put together with pins. Undoubtedly her presence also served to dampen the gaiety. One knew from the look in the disdainful green eyes and the faint mocking smile on the frankly painted red mouth that she was aware of the effect she made and was delighted with her triumph. Wherever she went, always escorted by some man she had chosen with the air of conferring a favor, a little stir preceded her. She was indeed very disagreeable....

If she had a rival in all the crowd that filled the echoing old house, it was Olivia Pentland—Sybil’s mother—who moved about, alone most of the time, watching her guests, acutely conscious that the ball was not all it should have been. There was about her nothing flamboyant and arresting, nothing which glittered with the worldly hardness of the green dress and the diamonds and burnished red hair of Sabine Callendar; she was, rather, a soft woman, of gentleness and poise, whose dark beauty conquered in a slower, more subtle fashion. You did not notice her at once among all the guests; you became aware of her slowly, as if her presence had the effect of stealing over you with the vagueness of a perfume. Suddenly you marked her from among all the others ... with a sense of faint excitement ... a pale white face, framed by smooth black hair drawn back low over the brows in a small knot at the back of her head. You noticed the clear, frank blue eyes, that in some lights seemed almost black, and most of all you noticed when she spoke that her voice was low, warm, and in a way irresistible, a voice with a hundred shades of color. She had a way, too, of laughing, when she was struck by the absurdity of something, that was like a child. One knew her at once for a great lady. It was impossible to believe that she was nearly forty and the mother of Sybil and a boy of fifteen.

Circumstance and a wisdom of her own had made of her a woman who seemed inactive and self-effacing. She had a manner of doing things effortlessly, with a great quietness, and yet, after one came to know her, one felt that she missed little which took place within sight or hearing—not only the obvious things which any stupid person might have noticed, but the subtle, indefinite currents which passed from one person to another. She possessed, it seemed, a marvelous gift for smoothing out troubles. A security, of the sort which often marks those who suffer from a too great awareness, enveloped and preceded her, turning to calm all the troubled world about her. Yet she was disturbing, too, in an odd, indefinable way. There was always a remoteness and a mystery, a sense almost of the fey. It was only after one had known her for a long time, enveloped in the quietness of her pleasant presence, that a faint sense of uneasiness was born. It would occur to you, with the surprise almost of a shock, that the woman you saw before you, the woman who was so gentle and serene, was not Olivia Pentland at all, but a kind of clay figure which concealed, far beneath the veneer of charm, a woman you did not know at all, who was remote and sad and perhaps lonely. In the end, she disturbed the person of discernment far more profoundly than the glittering, disagreeable Sabine Callendar.

In the midst of the noise and confusion of the ball, she had been moving about, now in this big room, now in that one, talking quietly to her guests, watching them, seeing that all went well; and, like all the others, she was fascinated at the spectacle of Sabine’s rebellion and triumph, perhaps even a little amused at the childishness of such defiance in a woman of forty-six who was clever, independent and even distinguished, who need not have troubled to flaunt her success.

Watching Sabine, whom she knew intimately enough, she had guessed that underneath the shell made so superbly by hairdresser, couturier and jeweler there lay hidden an awkward, red-haired little girl who was having her revenge now, walking roughshod over all the prejudices and traditions of such people as Aunt Cassie and John Pentland and Cousin Struthers Smallwood, D.D., whom Sabine always called “the Apostle to the Genteel.” It was almost, thought Olivia, as if Sabine, even after an exile of twenty years, was still afraid of them and that curious, undefeatable power which they represented.

But Sabine, she knew, was observing the party at the same time. She had watched her all the evening in the act of “absorbing” it; she knew that when Sabine walked across from Brook Cottage the next day, she would know everything that had happened at the ball, for she had a passion for inspecting life. Beneath the stony mask of indifference there boiled a perpetual and passionate interest in the intricacies of human affairs. Sabine herself had once described it as “the curse of analysis which took all the zest out of life.”

She was fond of Sabine as a creature unique in the realm of her experience, one who was amusing and actually made fetishes of truth and reality. She had a way of turning her intellect (for it was really a great intellect) upon some tangled, hopeless situation to dissolve it somehow into its proper elements and make it appear suddenly clear, uncomplicated and, more often than not, unpleasant; because the truth was not always a sweet and pleasant thing.

2

No one suffered more keenly from Sabine’s triumphant return than the invincible Aunt Cassie. In a way, she had always looked upon Sabine, even in the long years of her voluntary exile from the delights of Durham, as her own property, much as she might have looked upon a dog, if, indeed, the old lady had been able to bear the society of anything so untidy as a dog. Childless herself, she had exercised all her theories of upbringing upon the unfortunate orphaned little daughter of her husband’s brother.

At the moment, the old lady sat half-way down the white stairs, her sharp, black eyes surveying the ball with a faint air of disapproval. The noisy music made her nervous and uneasy, and the way young girls had of using paint and powder seemed to her cheap and common. “One might as well brush one’s teeth at the dinner-table.” Secretly, she kept comparing everything with the ball given for herself forty years earlier, an event which had resulted at length in the capture of Mr. Struthers. Dressed economically (for she made it a point of honor to live on the income of her income), and in mourning for a husband dead eight years earlier, she resembled a dignified but slightly uneasy crow perched on a fence.

It was Sabine who observed that Aunt Cassie and her “lady companion,” Miss Peavey, sitting on the steps together, resembled a crow and a pouter pigeon. Miss Peavey was not only fat, she was actually bulbous—one of those women inclined by nature toward “flesh,” who would have been fat on a diet of sawdust and distilled water; and she had come into the family life nearly thirty years earlier as a companion, a kind of slave, to divert Aunt Cassie during the long period of her invalidism. She had remained there ever since, taking the place of a husband who was dead and children who had never been born.

There was something childlike about Miss Peavey—some people said that she was not quite bright—but she suited Aunt Cassie to a T, for she was as submissive as a child and wholly dependent in a financial sense. Aunt Cassie even gave her enough to make up for the losses she incurred by keeping a small shop in Boston devoted to the sale of “artistic” pottery. Miss Peavey was a lady, and though penniless, was “well connected” in Boston. At sixty she had grown too heavy for her birdlike little feet and so took very little exercise. To-night she was dressed in a very fancy gown covered with lace and sequins and passementerie, rather in the mode which some one had told her was her style in the far-off days of her girlhood. Her hair was streaked with gray and cut short in a shaggy, uneven fashion; not, however, because short hair was chic, but because she had cut it ten years before short hair had been heard of, in a sudden futile gesture of freedom at the terrible moment she made her one feeble attempt to escape Aunt Cassie and lead her own life. She had come back in the end, when her poor savings gave out and bankruptcy faced her, to be received by Aunt Cassie with dignified sighs and flutters as a returned and repentant prodigal. In this rôle she had lived ever since in a state of complete subjection. She was Aunt Cassie’s creature now, to go where Aunt Cassie ordered, to do as she was bid, to be an ear-piece when there was at hand no one more worthy of address.

At the sight of Sabine’s green dress and red hair moving through the big hall below them, Aunt Cassie said, with a gleam in her eye: “Sabine seems to be worried about her daughter. The poor child doesn’t seem to be having a success, but I suppose it’s no wonder. The poor thing is very plain. I suppose she got the sallow skin from her father. He was part Greek and French.... Sabine was never popular as a young girl herself.”

And she fell to speculating for the hundredth time on the little-known circumstances of Sabine’s unhappy marriage and divorce, turning the morsels over and over again with a variety of speculation and the interjection of much pious phraseology; for in Aunt Cassie’s speech God seemed to have a hand in everything. He had a way of delivering trials and blessings indiscriminately, and so in the end became responsible for everything.

Indeed, she grew a bit spiteful about Sabine, for there was in the back of her mind the memory of an encounter, a day or two earlier, when she had been put completely to rout. It was seldom that Aunt Cassie met any one who was a match for her, and when such an encounter took place the memory of it rankled until she found some means of subduing the offender. With Miss Peavey she was completely frank, for through long service this plump, elderly virgin had come to be a sort of confessor in whose presence Aunt Cassie wore no mask. She was always saying, “Don’t mind Miss Peavey. She doesn’t matter.”

“I find Sabine extremely hard and worldly,” she was saying. “I would never know her for the same modest young girl she was on leaving me.” She sighed abysmally and continued, “But, then, we mustn’t judge. I suppose the poor girl has had a great deal of misery. I pity her to the depths of my heart!”

In Aunt Cassie’s speeches, in every phrase, there was always a certain mild theatrical overtone as if she sought constantly to cast a sort of melodramatic haze over all she said. Nothing was ever stated simply. Everything from the sight of a pot of sour cream to the death of her husband affected her extravagantly, to the depths of her soul.

But this brought no response from Miss Peavey, who seemed lost in the excitement of watching the young people, her round candid eyes shining through her pince-nez with the eagerness of one who has spent her whole life as a “lady companion.” At moments like this, Aunt Cassie felt that Miss Peavey was not quite bright, and sometimes said so.

Undiscouraged, she went on. “Olivia looks bad, too, to-night ... very tired and worn. I don’t like those circles under her eyes.... I’ve thought for a long time that she was unhappy about something.”

But Miss Peavey’s volatile nature continued to lose itself completely in the spectacle of young girls who were so different from the girls of her day; and in the fascinating sight of Mr. Hoskins, a fat, sentimental, middle-aged neighbor who had taken a glass too much champagne and was talking archly to the patient Olivia. Miss Peavey had quite forgotten herself in the midst of so much gaiety. She did not even see the glances of Aunt Cassie in her direction—glances which plainly said, “Wait until I get you alone!”

For a long time Aunt Cassie had been brooding over what she called “Olivia’s strange behavior.” It was a thing which she had noticed for the first time a month or two earlier when Olivia, in the midst of one of Aunt Cassie’s morning calls, had begun suddenly, quietly, to weep and had left the room without a word of explanation. It had gone from bad to worse lately; she felt Olivia slipping away from all control directly in opposition to her own benevolent advice. There was the matter of this very ball. Olivia had ignored her counsels of economy and thrift, and now Aunt Cassie was suffering, as if the champagne which flowed so freely were blood drawn from her own veins. Not for a century, since Savina Pentland purchased a parure of pearls and emeralds, had so much Pentland money been expended at one time on mere pleasure.

She disapproved, too, of the youthfulness of Olivia and of Sabine. Women of their ages ought not to look so fresh and young. There was something vulgar, even a little improper, in a woman like Sabine who at forty-six looked thirty-five. At thirty, Aunt Cassie herself had settled down as a middle-aged woman, and since then she had not changed greatly. At sixty-five, “childless and alone in the world” (save, of course, for Miss Peavey), she was much the same as she had been at thirty in the rôle of wife to the “trying Mr. Struthers.” The only change had been her recovery from a state of semi-invalidism, a miracle occurring simultaneously with the passing of Mr. Struthers.

She had never quite forgiven Olivia for being an outsider who had come into the intricate web of life at Pentlands out of (of all places) Chicago. Wisps of mystery and a faint sense of the alien had clung to her ever since. Of course, it wasn’t to be expected that Olivia could understand entirely what it meant to marry into a family whose history was so closely woven into that of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the life of Boston. What could it mean to Olivia that Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell and Dr. Holmes had often spent weeks at Pentlands? That Mr. Emerson himself had come there for week-ends? Still (Aunt Cassie admitted to herself), Olivia had done remarkably well. She had been wise enough to watch and wait and not go ahead strewing her path with blunders.

Into the midst of these thoughts the figure of Olivia herself appeared, moving toward the stairway, walking beside Sabine. They were laughing over something, Sabine in the sly, mocking way she had, and Olivia mischievously, with a suspicious twinkle in her eyes. Aunt Cassie was filled with an awful feeling that they were sharing some joke about the people at the ball, perhaps even about herself and Miss Peavey. Since Sabine had returned, she felt that Olivia had grown even more strange and rebellious; nevertheless, she admitted to herself that there was a distinction about them both. She preferred the quiet distinction of Olivia to the violence of the impression made by the glittering Sabine. The old lady sensed the distinction, but, belonging to a generation which lived upon emotion rather than analysis, she did not get to the root of it. She did not see that one felt at once on seeing Olivia, “Here is a lady!”—perhaps, in the true sense of the word, the only lady in the room. There was a gentleness about her and a softness and a proud sort of poise—all qualities of which Aunt Cassie approved; it was the air of mystery which upset the old lady. One never knew quite what Olivia was thinking. She was so gentle and soft-spoken. Sometimes of late, when pressing Olivia too hotly, Aunt Cassie, aware of rousing something indefinably perilous in the nature of the younger woman, drew back in alarm.

Rising stiffly, the old lady groaned a little and, moving down the stairs, said, “I must go, Olivia dear,” and, turning, “Miss Peavey will go with me.”

Miss Peavey would have stayed, because she was enjoying herself, looking down on all those young people, but she had obeyed the commands of Aunt Cassie for too long, and now she rose, complaining faintly, and made ready to leave.

Olivia urged them to stay, and Sabine, looking at the old lady out of green eyes that held a faint glitter of hatred, said abruptly: “I always thought you stayed until the bitter end, Aunt Cassie.”

A sigh answered her ... a sigh filled with implications regarding Aunt Cassie’s position as a lonely, ill, bereft, widowed creature for whom life was finished long ago. “I am not young any longer, Sabine,” she said. “And I feel that the old ought to give way to the young. There comes a time....”

Sabine gave an unearthly chuckle. “Ah,” she said, in her hard voice, “I haven’t begun to give up yet. I am still good for years.”

“You’re not a child any more, Sabine,” the old lady said sharply.

“No, certainly I’m not a child any more.” And the remark silenced Aunt Cassie, for it struck home at the memory of that wretched scene in which she had been put to rout so skilfully.

There was a great bustle about getting the two old ladies under way, a great search for cloaks and scarfs and impedimenta; but at last they went off, Aunt Cassie saying over her thin, high shoulder, “Will you say good-by to your dear father-in-law, Olivia? I suppose he’s playing bridge with Mrs. Soames.”

“Yes,” replied Olivia from the terrace, “he’s playing bridge with Mrs. Soames.”

Aunt Cassie merely cleared her throat, forcibly, and with a deep significance. In her look, as in the sound of her voice, she managed to launch a flood of disapproval upon the behavior of old John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames.

Bidding the driver to go very slowly, she climbed into her shabby, antiquated motor, followed respectfully by Miss Peavey, and drove off down the long elm-bordered drive between the lines of waiting motors.

Olivia’s “dear father-in-law” was Aunt Cassie’s own brother, but she chose always to relate him to Olivia, as if in some way it bound Olivia more closely, more hopelessly, into the fabric of the family.

As the two younger women reentered the house, Olivia asked, “Where’s Thérèse? I haven’t seen her for more than an hour.”

“She’s gone home.”

“Thérèse ... gone home ... from a ball given for her!”

Olivia halted in astonishment and stood leaning against the wall, looking so charming and lovely that Sabine thought, “It’s a sin for a woman so beautiful to have such a life.”

Aloud Sabine said, “I caught her stealing away. She walked across to the cottage. She said she hated it and was miserable and bored and would rather be in bed.” Sabine shrugged her handsome shoulders and added, “So I let her go. What difference does it make?”

“None, I suppose.”

“I never force her to do things of this sort. I had too much forcing when I was young; Thérèse is to do exactly as she likes and be independent. The trouble is, she’s been spoilt by knowing older men and men who talk intelligently.” She laughed and added, “I was wrong about coming back here. I’ll never marry her off in this part of the world. The men are all afraid of her.”

Olivia kept seeing the absurd figure of Sabine’s daughter, small and dark, with large burning eyes and an air of sulky independence, striding off on foot through the dust of the lane that led back to Brook Cottage. She was so different from her own daughter, the quiet, well-mannered Sybil.

“I don’t think she’s properly impressed by Durham,” said Olivia, with a sudden mischievous smile.

“No ... she’s bored by it.”

Olivia paused to say good-night to a little procession of guests ... the Pingree girls dressed alike in pink tulle; the plump Miss Perkins, who had the finest collection of samplers in New England; Rodney Phillips, whose life was devoted to breeding springers and behaving like a perfect English gentleman; old Mr. Tilney, whose fortune rested on the mills of Durham and Lynn and Salem; and Bishop Smallwood, a cousin of the Pentlands and Sabine (whom Sabine called the Apostle of the Genteel). The Bishop complimented Olivia on the beauty of her daughter and coquetted heavily with Sabine. Motors rushed out from among the lilacs and syringas and bore them away one by one.

When they had gone Sabine said abruptly, “What sort of man is this Higgins ... I mean your head stableman?”

“A good sort,” replied Olivia. “The children are very fond of him. Why?”

“Oh ... no reason at all. I happened to think of him to-night because I noticed him standing on the terrace just now looking in at the ball.”

“He was a jockey once ... a good one, I believe, until he got too heavy. He’s been with us ten years. He’s good and reliable and sometimes very funny. Old Mr. Pentland depends on him for everything.... Only he has a way of getting into scrapes with the girls from the village. He seems irresistible to them ... and he’s an immoral scamp.”

Sabine’s face lighted up suddenly, as if she had made a great discovery. “I thought so,” she observed, and wandered away abruptly to continue the business of “absorbing” the ball.

She had asked about Higgins because the man was stuck there in her brain, set in the midst of a strange, confused impression that disturbed a mind usually marked by precision and clarity. She did not understand why it was that he remained the most vivid of all the kaleidoscopic procession of the ball. He had been an outsider, a servant, looking in upon it, and yet there he was—a man whom she had never noticed before—vivid and clear-cut, dominating the whole evening.

It had happened a little earlier when, standing in the windowed alcove of the old red-paneled writing-room, she had turned her back for a moment on the ball, to look out upon the distant marshes and the sea, across meadows where every stone and tree and hedge was thrown into a brilliant relief by the clarity of the moonlight and the thin New England air. And trapped suddenly by the still and breathless beauty of the meadows and marshes and distant white dunes, lost in memories more than twenty years old, she had found herself thinking: “It was always like this ... rather beautiful and hard and cold and a little barren, only I never saw it before. It’s only now, when I’ve come back after twenty years, that I see my own country exactly as it is.”

And then, standing there quite alone, she had become aware slowly that she was being watched by some one. There was a sudden movement among the lilacs that stood a little way off wrapped in thick black shadows ... the faintest stirring of the leaves that drew her sharply back to a consciousness of where she was and why she was there; and, focusing all her attention, she was able to make out presently a short, stocky little figure, and a white face peering out from among the branches, watching the dancers who moved about inside the house. The sight produced in her suddenly a sensation of uneasiness and a faint prickling of the skin, which slipped away presently when she recognized the odd, prematurely wrinkled face of Higgins, the Pentland groom. She must have seen him a dozen times before, barely noticing him, but now she saw him with a kind of illuminating clarity, in a way which made his face and figure unforgettable.

He was clad in the eternal riding-breeches and a sleeveless cotton shirt that exposed the short, hairy, muscular arms. Standing there he seemed, with his arched, firmly planted legs, like some creature rooted into the soil ... like the old apple-tree which stood in the moonlight showering the last of its white petals on the black lawn. There was something unpleasant in the sight, as if (she thought afterwards) she had been watched without knowing it by some animal of an uncanny intelligence.

And then abruptly he had slipped away again, shyly, among the branches of the lilacs ... like a faun.

Olivia, looking after Sabine as she walked away, smiled at the knowledge of where she was bound. Sabine would go into the old writing-room and there, sitting in a corner, would pretend that she was interested in the latest number of the Mercure de France or some fashion paper, and all the time she would be watching, listening, while old John Pentland and poor battered old Mrs. Soames sat playing bridge with a pair of contemporaries. Sabine, she knew, wanted to probe the lives of the two old people. She wasn’t content like the others at Pentlands to go on pretending that there had never been anything between them. She wanted to get to the root of the story, to know the truth. It was the truth, always the truth, which fascinated Sabine.

And Olivia felt a sudden, swift, almost poignant wave of affection for the abrupt, grim woman, an affection which it was impossible to express because Sabine was too scornful of all sentiment and too shut in ever to receive gracefully a demonstration; yet she fancied that Sabine knew she was fond of her, in the same shy, silent way that old John Pentland knew she was fond of him. It was impossible for either of them ever to speak of such simple things as affection.

Since Sabine had come to Durham, it seemed to Olivia that life was a little less barren and not quite so hopeless. There was in Sabine a curious hard, solid strength which the others, save only the old man, lacked completely. Sabine had made some discovery in life that had set her free ... of everything but that terrible barrier of false coldness.

In the midst of these thoughts came another procession of retreating guests, and the sadness, slipping away from Olivia’s face, gave way to a perfect, artificial sort of gaiety. She smiled, she murmured, “Good-night, must you go,” and, “Good-night, I’m so glad that you liked the ball.” She was arch with silly old men and kind to the shy young ones and repeated the same phrases over and over again monotonously. People went away saying, “What a charming woman Olivia Pentland is!”

Yet immediately afterward she did not remember who had passed by her.

One by one the guests departed, and presently the black musicians packed up their instruments and went away, and at last Sybil appeared, shy and dark, looking a little pale and tired in her clinging gown of pale green. At sight of her daughter a little thrill of pride ran through Olivia. She was the loveliest of all the girls at the ball, not the most flamboyant, but the gentlest and really the most beautiful. She possessed the same slow beauty of her mother, which enveloped one in a kind of mist that lingered long after she herself had gone away. She was neither loud and mannish and vulgar like the “horsey” women nor common like the girls who used too much paint and tried to behave like women of the world. There was already about her the timelessness that envelops a lady no matter the generation in which she appears; there was a mystery, a sophistication and knowledge of life which put to rout all the cheap flashiness of the others. And yet, somehow, that same cool, shy poise and beauty frightened people. Boys who were used to calling young girls “Good old So-and-so” found themselves helpless before the dignity of a young girl who looked in her green gown a little like a cool wood-nymph. It troubled Olivia profoundly, not for herself, but because she wanted the girl to be happy—more than that, to know the depths of happiness which she herself had sensed but never found. It was in a way as if she saw herself again in Sybil, as if looking back now from the pinnacle of her own experience she could guide this younger self, standing on the brink of life, along paths less barren than those trod by her own feet. It was so necessary that Sybil should fall in love with a man who would make her happy. With most girls it would make little difference one way or another, so long as they had money; if they were unhappy or bored they would divorce their husbands and try again because that was the rule in their world. But with Sybil, marriage would be either an immense, incalculable happiness or a profound and hopeless tragedy.

She thought suddenly of what Sabine had said of Thérèse a little while before. “I was wrong about coming back here. I’ll never marry her off in this part of the world.”

It was true somehow of Sybil. The girl, in some mysterious fashion, knew what it was she wanted; and this was not a life which was safe and assured, running smoothly in a rigid groove fixed by tradition and circumstance. It was not marriage with a man who was like all the other men in his world. It went deeper than all that. She wanted somehow to get far down beneath the surface of that life all about her, deep down where there was a savor to all she did. It was a hunger which Olivia understood well enough.

The girl approached her mother and, slipping her arm about her waist, stood there, looking for all the world like Olivia’s sister.

“Have you enjoyed it?” asked Olivia.

“Yes.... It’s been fun.”

Olivia smiled. “But not too much?”

“No, not too much.” Sybil laughed abruptly, as if some humorous memory had suddenly come to life.

“Thérèse ran away,” said her mother.

“I know ... she told me she was going to.”

“She didn’t like it.”

“No ... she thought the boys stupid.”

“They’re very much like all boys of their age. It’s not an interesting time.”

Sybil frowned a little. “Thérèse doesn’t think so. She says all they have to talk about is their clubs and drinking ... neither subject is of very much interest.”

“They might have been, if you’d lived here always ... like the other girls. You and Thérèse see it from the outside.” The girl didn’t answer, and Olivia asked: “You don’t think I was wrong in sending you to France to school?”

Quickly Sybil looked up. “Oh, no ... no,” she said, and then added with smoldering eagerness, “I wouldn’t have changed it for anything in the world.”

“I thought you might enjoy life more if you saw a little more than one corner of it.... I wanted you to be away from here for a little time.” (She did not say what she thought—“because I wanted you to escape the blight that touches everything at Pentlands.”)

“I’m glad,” the girl replied. “I’m glad because it makes everything different.... I can’t explain it.... Only as if everything had more meaning than it would have otherwise.”

Suddenly Olivia kissed her daughter and said: “You’re a clever girl; things aren’t wasted on you. And now go along to bed. I’ll stop in to say good-night.”

She watched the girl as she moved away through the big empty hall past the long procession of Pentland family portraits, thinking all the while that beside them Sybil seemed so fresh and full of warm eager life; and when at last she turned, she encountered her father-in-law and old Mrs. Soames moving along the narrow passage that led from the writing-room. It struck her sharply that the gaunt, handsome old John Pentland seemed really old to-night, in a way he had never been before, old and a little bent, with purplish circles under his bright black eyes.

Old Mrs. Soames, with her funny, intricate, dyed-black coiffure and rouged cheeks and sagging chin supported by a collar of pearls, leaned on his arm—the wreck of a handsome woman who had fallen back upon such silly, obvious tricks as rouge and dye—a vain, tragic old woman who never knew that she was a figure of fun. At sight of her, there rose in Olivia’s mind a whole vista of memories—assembly after assembly with Mrs. Soames in stomacher and tiara standing in the reception line bowing and smirking over rites that had survived in a provincial fashion some darker, more barbaric, social age.

And the sight of the old man walking gently and slowly, out of deference to Mrs. Soames’ infirmities, filled Olivia with a sudden desire to weep.

John Pentland said, “I’m going to drive over with Mrs. Soames, Olivia dear. You can leave the door open for me.” And giving his daughter-in-law a quick look of affection he led Mrs. Soames away across the terrace to his motor.

It was only after they had gone that Olivia discovered Sabine standing in the corridor in her brilliant green dress watching the two old people from the shadow of one of the deep-set windows. For a moment, absorbed in the sight of John Pentland helping Mrs. Soames with a grim courtliness into the motor, neither of them spoke, but as the motor drove away down the long drive under the moon-silvered elms, Sabine sighed and said, “I can remember her as a great beauty ... a really great beauty. There aren’t any more like her, who make their beauty a profession. I used to see her when I was a little girl. She was beautiful—like Diana in the hunting-field. They’ve been like that for ... for how long.... It must be forty years, I suppose.”

“I don’t know,” said Olivia quietly. “They’ve been like that ever since I came to Pentlands.” (And as she spoke she was overcome by a terrible feeling of sadness, of an abysmal futility. It had come to her more and more often of late, so often that at times it alarmed her lest she was growing morbid.)

Sabine was speaking again in her familiar, precise, metallic voice. “I wonder,” she said, “if there has ever been anything....”

Olivia, divining the rest of the question, answered it quickly, interrupting the speech. “No ... I’m sure there’s never been anything more than we’ve seen.... I know him well enough to know that.”

For a long time Sabine remained thoughtful, and at last she said: “No ... I suppose you’re right. There couldn’t have been anything. He’s the last of the Puritans.... The others don’t count. They go on pretending, but they don’t believe any more. They’ve no vitality left. They’re only hypocrites and shadows.... He’s the last of the royal line.”

She picked up her silver cloak and, flinging it about her fine white shoulders, said abruptly: “It’s almost morning. I must get some sleep. The time’s coming when I have to think about such things. We’re not as young as we once were, Olivia.”

On the moonlit terrace she turned and asked: “Where was O’Hara? I didn’t see him.”

“No ... he was asked. I think he didn’t come on account of Anson and Aunt Cassie.”

The only reply made by Sabine was a kind of scornful grunt. She turned away and entered her motor. The ball was over now and the last guest gone, and she had missed nothing—Aunt Cassie, nor old John Pentland, nor O’Hara’s absence, nor even Higgins watching them all in the moonlight from the shadow of the lilacs.

The night had turned cold as the morning approached and Olivia, standing in the doorway, shivered a little as she watched Sabine enter her motor and drive away. Far across the meadows she saw the lights of John Pentland’s motor racing along the lane on the way to the house of old Mrs. Soames; she watched them as they swept out of sight behind the birch thicket and reappeared once more beyond the turnpike, and as she turned away at last it occurred to her that the life at Pentlands had undergone some subtle change since the return of Sabine.

CHAPTER II

It was Olivia’s habit (and in some way every small action at Pentlands came inevitably to be a habit) to go about the house each night before climbing the paneled stairs, to see that all was in order, and by instinct she made the little tour as usual after Sabine had disappeared, stopping here and there to speak to the servants, bidding them to go to bed and clear away in the morning. On her way she found that the door of the drawing-room, which had been open all the evening, was now, for some reason, closed.

It was a big square room belonging to the old part of the house that had been built by the Pentland who made a fortune out of equipping privateers and practising a sort of piracy upon British merchantmen—a room which in the passing of years had come to be a museum filled with the relics and souvenirs of a family which could trace its ancestry back three hundred years to a small dissenting shopkeeper who had stepped ashore on the bleak New England coast very soon after Miles Standish and Priscilla Alden. It was a room much used by all the family and had a worn, pleasant look that compensated for the monstrous and incongruous collection of pictures and furniture. There were two or three Sheraton and Heppelwhite chairs and a handsome old mahogany table, and there were a plush sofa and a vast rocking-chair of uncertain ancestry, and a hideous bronze lamp that had been the gift of Mr. Longfellow to old John Pentland’s mother. There were two execrable water-colors—one of the Tiber and the Castle San Angelo and one of an Italian village—made by Miss Maria Pentland during a tour of Italy in 1846, and a stuffed chair with tassels, a gift from old Colonel Higginson, a frigid steel engraving of the Signing of the Declaration which hung over the white mantelpiece, and a complete set of Woodrow Wilson’s History of the United States given by Senator Lodge (whom Aunt Cassie always referred to as “dear Mr. Lodge”). In this room were collected mementoes of long visits paid by Mr. Lowell and Mr. Emerson and General Curtis and other good New Englanders, all souvenirs which Olivia had left exactly as she found them when she came to the big house as the bride of Anson Pentland; and to those who knew the room and the family there was nothing unbeautiful or absurd about it. The effect was historical. On entering it one almost expected a guide to step forward and say, “Mr. Longfellow once wrote at this desk,” and, “This was Senator Lodge’s favorite chair.” Olivia knew each tiny thing in the room with a sharp sense of intimacy.

She opened the door softly and found that the lights were still burning and, strangest of all, that her husband was sitting at the old desk surrounded by the musty books and yellowed letters and papers from which he was compiling laboriously a book known as “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” The sight of him surprised her, for it was his habit to retire punctually at eleven every night, even on such an occasion as this. He had disappeared hours earlier from the ball, and he still sat here in his dinner coat, though it was long after midnight.

She had entered the room so softly that he did not hear her and for a moment she remained silently looking down at him, as if undetermined whether to speak or to go quietly away. He sat with his back to her so that the sloping shoulders and the thin, ridged neck and partly bald head stood outlined against the white of the paneling. Suddenly, as if conscious of being watched, he turned and looked at her. He was a man of forty-nine who looked older, with a long horse-face like Aunt Cassie’s—a face that was handsome in a tired, yellow sort of way—and small, round eyes the color of pale-blue porcelain. At the sight of Olivia the face took on a pouting expression of sourness ... a look which she knew well as one that he wore when he meant to complain of something.

“You are sitting up very late,” she observed quietly, with a deliberate air of having noticed nothing unusual.

“I was waiting to speak to you. I want to talk with you. Please sit down for a moment.”

There was an odd sense of strangeness in their manner toward each other, as if there had never been, even years before when the children were babies, any great intimacy between them. On his part there was, too, a sort of stiff and nervous formality, rather quaint and Victorian, and touched by an odd air of timidity. He was a man who would always do not perhaps the proper thing, but the thing accepted by his world as “proper.”

It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for so many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant usually that there was some complaint to be made against the servants, more often than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd, inexplicable intensity.

Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat there, waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on which he had been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange, unaccustomed desire to be disagreeable, to create in some way an excitement that would shatter for a moment the overwhelming sense of monotony and so relieve her nerves. She thought, “What has come over me? Am I one of those women who enjoys working up scenes?”

He rose from his chair and stood, very tall and thin, with drooping shoulders, looking down at her out of the pale eyes. “It’s about Sybil,” he said. “I understand that she goes riding every morning with this fellow O’Hara.”

“That’s true,” replied Olivia quietly. “They go every morning before breakfast, before the rest of us are out.”

He frowned and assumed almost mechanically a manner of severe dignity. “And you mean to say that you have known about it all along?”

“They meet down in the meadows by the old gravel-pit because he doesn’t care to come up to the house.”

“He knows, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be welcome.”

Olivia smiled a little ironically. “I’m sure that’s the reason. That’s why he didn’t come to-night, though I asked him. You must know, Anson, that I don’t feel as you do about him.”

“No, I suppose not. You rarely do.”

“There’s no need to be unpleasant,” she said quietly.

“You seem to know a great deal about it.”

“Sybil tells me everything she does. It is much better to have it that way, I think.”

Watching him, it gave her a faint, warm sense of satisfaction to see that Anson was annoyed by her calmness, and yet she was a little ashamed, too, for wanting the excitement of a small scene, just a tiny scene, to make life seem a little more exciting. He said, “But you know how Aunt Cassie and my father feel about O’Hara.”

Then, for the first time, Olivia began to see light in the darkness. “Your father knows all about it, Anson. He has gone with them himself on the red mare, once or twice.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Why should I make up such a ridiculous lie? Besides, your father and I get on very well. You know that.” It was a mild thrust which had its success, for Anson turned away angrily. She had really said to him, “Your father comes to me about everything, not to you. He is not the one who objects or I should have known.” Aloud she said, “Besides, I have seen him with my own eyes.”

“Then I will take it on my own responsibility. I don’t like it and I want it stopped.”

At this speech Olivia’s brows arched ever so slightly with a look which might have been interpreted either as one of surprise or one of mockery or perhaps a little of both. For a moment she sat quite still, thinking, and at last she said, “Am I right in supposing that Aunt Cassie is at the bottom of this?” When he made no reply she continued, “Aunt Cassie must have gotten up very early to see them off.” Again a silence, and the dark little devil in Olivia urged her to say, “Or perhaps she got her information from the servants. She often does, you know.”

Slowly, while she was speaking, her husband’s face had grown more and more sour. The very color of the skin seemed to have changed so that it appeared faintly green in the light from the Victorian luster just above his narrow head.

“Olivia, you have no right to speak of my aunt in that way.”

“We needn’t go into that. I think you know that what I said was the truth.” And a slow warmth began to steal over her. She was getting beneath his skin. After all those long years, he was finding that she was not entirely gentle.

He was exasperated now and astonished. In a more gentle voice he said, “Olivia, I don’t understand what has come over you lately.”

She found herself thinking, wildly, “Perhaps he is going to soften. Perhaps there is still a chance of warmth in him. Perhaps even now, after so long, he is going to be pleasant and kind and perhaps ... perhaps ... more.”

“You’re very queer,” he was saying. “I’m not the only one who finds you so.”

“No,” said Olivia, a little sadly. “Aunt Cassie does, too. She’s been telling all the neighborhood that I seem to be unhappy. Perhaps it’s because I’m a little tired. I’ve not had much rest for a long time now ... from Jack, from Aunt Cassie, from your father ... and ... from her.” At the last word she made a curious little half-gesture in the direction of the dark north wing of the big house.

She watched him, conscious that he was shocked and startled by her mentioning in a single breath so many things which they never discussed at Pentlands, things which they buried in silence and tried to destroy by pretending that they did not exist.

“We ought to speak of those things, sometimes,” she continued sadly. “Sometimes when we are entirely alone with no one about to hear, when it doesn’t make any difference. We can’t pretend forever that they don’t exist.”

For a time he was silent, groping obviously, in a kind of desperation for something to answer. At last he said feebly, “And yet you sit up all night playing bridge with Sabine and old Mrs. Soames and Father.”

“That does me good. You must admit that it is a change at least.”

But he only answered, “I don’t understand you,” and began to pace up and down in agitation while she sat there waiting, actually waiting, for the thing to work itself up to a climax. She had a sudden feeling of victory, of intoxication such as she had not known in years, not since she was a young girl; and at the same time she wanted to laugh, wildly, hysterically, at the sight of Anson, so tall and thin, prancing up and down.

Opposite her he halted abruptly and said, “And I can see no good in inviting Mrs. Soames here so often.”

She saw now that the tension, the excitement between them, was greater even than she had imagined, for Anson had spoken of Mrs. Soames and his father, a thing which in the family no one ever mentioned. He had done it quite openly, of his own free will.

“What harm can it do now? What difference can it make?” she asked. “It is the only pleasure left to the poor battered old thing, and one of the few left to your father.”

Anson began to mutter in disgust. “It is a silly affair ... two old ... old....” He did not finish the sentence, for there was only one word that could have finished it and that was a word which no gentleman and certainly no Pentland ever used in referring to his own father.

“Perhaps,” said Olivia, “it is a silly affair now.... I’m not so sure that it always was.”

“What do you mean by that? Do you mean....” Again he fumbled for words, groping to avoid using the words that clearly came into his mind. It was strange to see him brought face to face with realities, to see him grow so helpless and muddled. “Do you mean,” he stammered, “that my father has ever behaved ...” he choked and then added, “dishonorably.”

“Anson ... I feel strangely like being honest to-night ... just for once ... just for once.”

“You are succeeding only in being perverse.”

“No ...” and she found herself smiling sadly, “unless you mean that in this house ... in this room....” She made a gesture which swept within the circle of her white arm all that collection of Victorian souvenirs, all the mementoes of a once sturdy and powerful Puritan family, “...in this room to be truthful and honest is to be perverse.”

He would have interrupted her here, angrily, but she raised her hand and continued, “No, Anson; I shall tell you honestly what I think ... whether you want to hear it or not. I don’t hope that it will do any good.... I do not know whether, as you put it, your father has behaved dishonorably or not. I hope he has.... I hope he was Mrs. Soames’ lover in the days when love could have meant something to them.... Yes ... something fleshly is exactly what I mean.... I think it would have been better. I think they might have been happy ... really happy for a little time ... not just living in a state of enchantment when one day is exactly like the next.... I think your father, of all men, has deserved that happiness....” She sighed and added in a low voice, “There, now you know!”

For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round, silly blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were so like the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing and was known in the family simply as she, as if there was very little that was human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping mustache, as if speaking to himself, “I can’t imagine what has happened to you.”

“Nothing,” said Olivia. “Nothing. I am the same as I have always been, only to-night I have come to the end of saying ‘yes, yes’ to everything, of always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living undisturbed in our dream ... believing always that we are superior to every one else on the earth, that because we are rich we are powerful and righteous, that because ... oh, there is no use in talking.... I am just the same as I have always been, only to-night I have spoken out. We all live in a dream here ... a dream that some day will turn sharply into a nightmare. And then what will we do? What will you do ... and Aunt Cassie and all the rest?”

In her excitement her cheeks grew flushed and she stood up, very tall and beautiful, leaning against the mantelpiece; but her husband did not notice her. He appeared to be lost in deep thought, his face contorted with a kind of grim concentration.

“I know what has happened,” he said presently. “It is Sabine. She should never have come back here. She was like that always ... stirring up trouble ... even as a little girl. She used to break up our games by saying: ‘I won’t play house. Who can be so foolish as to pretend muddy water is claret! It’s a silly game.’”

“Do you mean that she is saying it again now ... that it’s a silly game to pretend muddy water is claret?”

He turned away without answering and began again to pace up and down over the enormous faded roses of the old Victorian carpet. “I don’t know what you’re driving at. All I know is that Sabine ... Sabine ... is an evil woman.”

“Do you hate Sabine because she is a friend of mine?”

She had watched him for so many years disliking the people who were her friends, managing somehow to get rid of them, to keep her from seeing them, to force her into those endless dinners at the houses of the safe men he knew, the men who had gone to his college and belonged to his club, the men who would never do anything that was unexpected. And in the end she had always done as he wanted her to do. It was perhaps a manifestation of his resentment toward all those whom he could not understand and even (she thought) feared a little—the attitude of a man who will not allow others to enjoy what he could not take for himself. It was the first time she had ever spoken of this dog-in-the-manger game, but she found herself unable to keep silent. It was as if some power outside her had taken possession of her body. She had a strange sensation of shame at the very moment she spoke, of shame at the sound of her own voice, a little strained and hysterical.

There was something preposterous, too, in the sight of Anson prancing up and down the old room filled with all the souvenirs of that decayed respectability in which he wrapped himself ... prancing up and down with all his prejudices and superstitions bristling. And now Olivia had dragged the truth uncomfortably into the light.

“What an absurd thing to say!” he said bitterly.

Olivia sighed. “No, I don’t think so.... I think you know exactly what I mean.” (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a truthful, unpleasant statement.)

But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her, more savage and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed for a second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. “And I don’t like that Fiji Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all over the world and had her head filled with barbaric ideas.”

At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of their conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had spent here at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon Street. She knew suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt Cassie and all that intricate world of family. They were terrified lest the walls, the very foundations, of their existence be swept away leaving them helpless with all their little prides and vanities exposed, stripped of all the laws and prejudices which they had made to protect them. It was why they hated O’Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He had menaced their security. To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for in any other world save their own, in a world where they stood unprotected by all that money laid away in solid trust funds, they would have no existence whatever. They would suddenly be what they really were.

She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, “I think you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You distrust her because she is different from all the others ... from the sort of girls that you were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows there are enough of them about here ... girls as like as peas in a pod.”

“And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her daughter ... this American boy with a French name who has never seen his own country until now? I suppose he’ll be as queer as all the others. Who knows anything about him?”

“Sabine,” began Olivia.

“Sabine!” he interrupted. “Sabine! What does she care who he is or where he comes from? She’s given up decent people long ago, when she went away from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband. Sabine!... Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us ... the people to whom she belongs. She hates us.... She can barely speak to me in a civil fashion.”

Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath the cold steel engraving of the Signing. “You are beginning to talk nonsense, Anson. Let’s stick to facts, for once. I’ve met the boy in Paris.... Sybil knew him there. He is intelligent and handsome and treats women as if they were something more than stable-boys. There are still a few of us left who like to be treated thus ... as women ... a few of us even here in Durham. No, I don’t imagine you’ll care for him. He won’t belong to your club or to your college, and he’ll see life in a different way. He won’t have had his opinions all ready made, waiting for him.”

“It’s my children I’m thinking of.... I don’t want them picking up with any one, with the first person who comes along.”

Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, “If it’s Jack you’re worrying about, you needn’t fuss any longer. He won’t marry Thérèse. I don’t think you know how ill he is.... I don’t think, sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all.”

“I always talk with the doctors.”

“Then you ought to know that they’re silly ... the things you’re saying.”

“All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here....”

She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel of futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a cage, arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning with an air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the fireplace ... pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark eyes. There was a fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which had flamed up so suddenly were too violent for the body.

“Anson,” she said in a low voice, “please let’s be sensible. I shall look into this affair of Sybil and O’Hara and try to discover whether there is anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly to both of them. I don’t approve, either, but not for the same reason. He is too old for her. You won’t have any trouble. You will have to do nothing.... As to Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I like.”

In the midst of the speech she had grown suddenly, perilously, calm in the way which sometimes alarmed her husband and Aunt Cassie. Sighing a little, she continued, “I have been good and gentle, Anson, for years and years, and now, to-night ... to-night I feel as if I were coming to the end of it.... I only say this to let you know that it can’t go on forever.”

Picking up her scarf, she did not wait for him to answer her, but moved away toward the door, still enveloped in the same perilous calm. In the doorway she turned. “I suppose we can call the affair settled for the moment?”

He had been standing there all the while watching her out of the round cold blue eyes with a look of astonishment as if after all those years he had seen his wife for the first time; and then slowly the look of astonishment melted into one of slyness, almost of hatred, as if he thought, “So this is what you really are! So you have been thinking these things all these years and have never belonged to us at all. You have been hating us all the while. You have always been an outsider—a common, vulgar outsider.”

His thin, discontented lips had turned faintly gray, and when he spoke it was nervously, with a kind of desperation, like a small animal trapped in a corner. The words came out from the thin lips in a sharp, quick torrent, like the rush of white-hot steel released from a cauldron ... words spoken in a voice that was cold and shaken with hatred.

“In any case,” he said, “in any case ... I will not have my daughter marry a shanty Irishman.... There is enough of that in the family.”

For a moment Olivia leaned against the door-sill, her dark eyes wide with astonishment, as if she found it impossible to believe what she had heard. And then quietly, with a terrible sadness and serenity in her voice, she murmured almost to herself, “What a rotten thing to say!” And after a little pause, as if still speaking to herself, “So that is what you have been thinking for twenty years!” And again, “There is a terrible answer to that.... It’s so terrible that I shan’t say it, but I think you ... you and Aunt Cassie know well enough what it is.”

Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated, among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare, she made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland ancestors—the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina Pentland—and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband had not followed her in more than fifteen years.

Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the darkness, listening, listening, listening.... There was at first no sound save the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the white dunes and the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the direction of the kennels, and then, presently, there came to her the faint sound of soft, easy breathing from the adjoining room. It was regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son had been as strong as O’Hara or Higgins or that vigorous young de Cyon whom she had met once for a little while at Sabine’s house in Paris.

The sound filled her with a wild happiness, so that she forgot even what had happened in the drawing-room a little while before. As she undressed in the darkness she stopped now and then to listen again in a kind of fierce tension, as if by wishing it she could keep the sound from ever dying away. For more than three years she had never once entered this room free from the terror that there might only be silence to welcome her. And at last, after she had gone to bed and was falling asleep, she was wakened sharply by another sound, quite different, the sound of a wild, almost human cry ... savage and wicked, and followed by the thud thud of hoofs beating savagely against the walls of a stall, and then the voice of Higgins, the groom, cursing wickedly. She had heard it before—the sound of old John Pentland’s evil, beautiful red mare kicking the walls of her stall and screaming wildly. There was an unearthly, implacable hatred between her and the little apelike man ... and yet a sort of fascination, too. As she sat up in her bed, listening, and still startled by the wild sound, she heard her son saying:

“Mama, are you there?”

“Yes.”

She rose and went into the other room, where, in the dim light from the night-lamp, the boy was sitting up in bed, his pale blond hair all rumpled, his eyes wide open and staring a little.

“You’re all right, Jack?” she whispered. “There’s nothing the matter?”

“No—nothing. I had a bad dream and then I heard the red mare.”

He looked pale and ill, with the blue veins showing on his temples; yet she knew that he was stronger than he had been for months. He was fifteen, and he looked younger than his age, rather like a boy of thirteen or fourteen, but he was old, too, in the timeless fashion of those who have always been ill.

“Is the party over?... Have they all gone?” he asked.

“Yes, Jack.... It’s almost daylight. You’d better try to sleep again.”

He lay down without answering her, and as she bent to kiss him good-night, she heard him say softly, “I wish I could have gone to the party.”

“You will, Jack, some day—before very long. You’re growing stronger every day.”

Again a silence, while Olivia thought bitterly, “He knows that I’m lying. He knows that what I’ve said is not the truth.”

Aloud she said, “You’ll go to sleep now—like a good boy.”

“I wish you’d tell me about the party.”

Olivia sighed. “Then I must close Nannie’s door, so we won’t waken her.” And she closed the door leading to the room where the old nurse slept, and seating herself on the foot of her son’s bed, she began a recital of who had been at the ball, and what had happened there, bit by bit, carefully and with all the skill she was able to summon. She wanted to give him, who had so little chance of living, all the sense of life she was able to evoke.

She talked on and on, until presently she noticed that the boy had fallen asleep and that the sky beyond the marshes had begun to turn gray and rose and yellow with the rising day.

CHAPTER III

1

When Olivia first came to the old house as the wife of Anson Pentland, the village of Durham, which lay inland from Pentlands and the sea, had been invisible, lying concealed in a fold of the land which marked the faint beginnings of the New Hampshire mountains. There had been in the view a certain sleepy peacefulness: one knew that in the distant fold of land surmounted by a single white spire there lay a quiet village of white wooden houses built along a single street called High Street that was dappled in summer with the shadows of old elm-trees. In those days it had been a country village, half asleep, with empty shuttered houses here and there falling into slow decay—a village with fewer people in it than there had been a hundred years before. It had stayed thus sleeping for nearly seventy-five years, since the day when a great migration of citizens had robbed it of its sturdiest young people. In the thick grass that surrounded the old meeting-house there lay a marble slab recording the event with an inscription which read:

From this spot on the fourteenth day of August, eighteen hundred and eighteen, the Reverend Josiah Milford, Pastor of this Church, with one hundred and ninety members of his congregation—men, women and children—set out, secure in their faith in Almighty God, to establish His Will and Power in the Wilderness of the Western Reserve.

Beneath the inscription were cut the names of those families who had made the journey to found a new town which had since surpassed sleepy Durham a hundred times in wealth and prosperity. There was no Pentland name among them, for the Pentlands had been rich even in the year eighteen hundred and eighteen, and lived in winter in Boston and in summer at Durham, on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first of the family.

From that day until the mills came to Durham the village sank slowly into a kind of lethargy, and the church itself, robbed of its strength, died presently and was changed into a dusty museum filled with homely early American furniture and spinning-wheels—a place seldom visited by any one and painted grudgingly every five years by the town council because it was popularly considered an historical monument. The Pentland family long ago had filtered away into the cold faith of the Unitarians or the more compromising and easy creeds of the Episcopal church.

But now, nearly twenty years after Olivia had come to Pentlands, the village was alive again, so alive that it had overflowed its little fold in the land and was streaming down the hill on the side next to the sea in straight, plain columns of ugly stucco bungalows, each filled with its little family of Polish mill-workers. And in the town, across High Street from the white-spired old meeting-house, there stood a new church, built of stucco and green-painted wood and dedicated to the great Church of Rome. In the old wooden houses along High Street there still lingered remnants of the old families ... old Mrs. Featherstone, who did washing to support four sickly grandchildren who ought never to have been born; Miss Haddon, a queer old woman who wore a black cape and lived on a dole from old John Pentland as a remote cousin of the family; Harry Peckhan, the village carpenter; old Mrs. Malson, living alone in a damp, gaunt and beautiful old house filled with bits of jade and ivory brought back from China by her grandfather’s clippers; Miss Murgatroyd, who had long since turned her bullfinch house into a shabby tea-room. They remained here and there, a few worn and shabby-genteel descendants of those first settlers who had come into the country with the Pentlands.

But the mills had changed everything, the mills which poured wealth into the pockets of a dozen rich families who lived in summer within a few miles of Durham.

Even the countryside itself had changed. There were no longer any of the old New Englanders in possession of the land. Sometimes in riding along the lanes one encountered a thin, silly-faced remnant of the race sitting on a stone wall chewing a bit of grass; but that was all; the others had been swallowed up long ago in the mills of Salem and Lynn or died away, from too much inbreeding and too little nourishment. The few farms that remained fell into the hands of Poles and Czechs, solid, square people who were a little pagan in their closeness to the earth and the animals which surrounded them, sturdy people, not too moral, who wrought wonders with the barren, stony earth of New England and stood behind their walls staring wide-eyed while the grand people like the Pentlands rode by in pink coats surrounded by the waving nervous tails of foxhounds. And, one by one, other old farms were being turned back into a wilderness once more so that there would be plenty of room for the horses and hounds to run after foxes and bags of aniseed.

It had all changed enormously. From the upper windows of the big Georgian brick house where the Pentlands lived, one could see the record of all the changes. The windows commanded a wide view of a landscape composed of grubby meadows and stone walls, thickets of pine and white birches, marshes, and a winding sluggish brown river. Sometimes in the late autumn the deer wandered down from the mountains of New Hampshire to spoil the fox-hunting by leading the hounds astray after game that was far too fleet for them.

And nearer at hand, nestled within a turn of the river, lay the land where Sabine Callender had been born and had lived until she was a grown woman—the land which she had sold carelessly to O’Hara, an Irish politician and a Roman Catholic, come up from nowhere to take possession of it, to clip its hedges, repair its sagging walls, paint its old buildings and put up gates and fences that were too shiny and new. Indeed, he had done it so thoroughly and so well that the whole place had a little the air of a suburban real estate development. And now Sabine had returned to spend the summer in one of his houses and to be very friendly with him in the face of Aunt Cassie and Anson Pentland, and a score of others like them.

Olivia knew this wide and somberly beautiful landscape, every stick and stone of it, from the perilous gravel-pit, half-hidden by its fringe of elder-bushes, to the black pine copse where Higgins had discovered only a day or two before a new litter of foxes. She knew it on gray days when it was cold and depressing, on those bright, terribly clear New England days when every twig and leaf seemed outlined by light, and on those damp, cold days when a gray fog swept in across the marshes from the sea to envelop all the countryside in gray darkness. It was a hard, uncompromising, stony country that was never too cheerful.

It was a country, too, which gave her an old feeling of loneliness ... a feeling which, strangely enough, seemed to increase rather than diminish as the years passed. She had never accustomed herself to its occasional dreariness. In the beginning, a long while ago, it had seemed to her green and peaceful and full of quiet, a place where she might find rest and peace ... but she had come long since to see it as it was, as Sabine had seen it while she stood in the window of the writing-room, frightened by the sudden queer apparition of the little groom—a country beautiful, hard and cold, and a little barren.

2

There were times when the memories of Olivia’s youth seemed to sharpen suddenly and sweep in upon her, overwhelming all sense of the present, times when she wanted suddenly and fiercely to step back into that far-off past which had seemed then an unhappy thing, and these were the times when she felt most lonely, the times when she knew how completely, with the passing of years, she had drawn into herself; it was a process of protection like a tortoise drawing in its head. And all the while, in spite of the smiles and the politeness and the too facile amiability, she felt that she was really a stranger at Pentlands, that there were certain walls and barriers which she could never break down, past which she could never penetrate, certain faiths in which it was impossible for her to believe.

It was difficult now for her to remember very clearly what had happened before she came to Durham; it all seemed lost, confused, buried beneath the weight of her devotion to the vast family monument of the Pentlands. She had forgotten the names of people and places and confused the days and the years. At times it was difficult for her to remember the endless confusing voyages back and forth across the Atlantic and the vast, impersonal, vacuous hotels which had followed each other in the bleak and unreal procession of her childhood.

She could remember with a certain pitiful clarity two happy years spent at the school in Saint-Cloud, where for months at a time she had lived in a single room which she might call her own, where she had rested, free from the terror of hearing her mother say, “We must pack to-day. We are leaving to-morrow for St. Petersburg or London or San Remo or Cairo....”

She could scarcely remember at all the immense house of chocolate-colored stone fitted with fantastic turrets and balconies that overlooked Lake Michigan. It had been sold and torn down long ago, destroyed like all else that belonged to the far-off past. She could not remember the father who had died when she was three; but of him there remained at least a yellowing photograph of a great, handsome, brawny man with a humorous Scotch-Irish face, who had died at the moment when his name was coming to be known everywhere as a power in Washington. No, nothing remained of him save the old photograph, and the tenuous, mocking little smile which had come down to her, the way she had of saying, “Yes! Yes!” pleasantly when she meant to act in quite the contrary fashion.

There were times when the memory of her own mother became vague and fantastic, as if she had been no more than a figure out of some absurd photograph of the early nineteen hundreds ... the figure of a pretty woman, dressed fashionably in clothes that flowed away in both directions, from a wasp waist. It was like a figure out of one of those old photographs which one views with a kind of melancholy amusement. She remembered a vain, rather selfish and pretty woman, fond of flattery, who had been shrewd enough never to marry any one of those gallant dark gentlemen with high-sounding titles who came to call at the eternal changeless hotel sitting-room, to take her out to garden parties and fêtes and races. And always in the background of the memory there was the figure of a dark little girl, overflowing with spirits and a hunger for friends, who was left behind to amuse herself by walking out with the Swiss governess, to make friends among the children she encountered in the parks or on the beaches and the boulevards of whatever European city her mother was visiting at the moment ... friends whom she saw to-day and who were vanished to-morrow never to be seen again. Her mother, she saw now, belonged to the America of the nineties. She saw her now less as a real person than a character out of a novel by Mrs. Wharton.

But she had never remarried; she had remained the rich, pretty Mrs. McConnel of Chicago until that tragic day (the clearest of all Olivia’s memories and the most terrible) when she had died of fever abruptly in a remote and squalid Italian village, with only her daughter (a girl of seventeen), a quack doctor and the Russian driver of her motor to care for her.

The procession of confused and not-too-cheerful memories came to a climax in a gloomy, red brick house off Washington Square, where she had gone as an orphan to live with a rigid, bejetted, maternal aunt who had believed that the whole world revolved about Lenox, the Hudson River Valley and Washington Square—an aunt who had never spoken to Olivia’s father because she, like Anson and Aunt Cassie, had a prejudice against Irishmen who appeared out of nowhere, engaging, full of life and high spirits.

So at eighteen she had found herself alone in the world save for one bejetted aunt, with no friends save those she had picked up as a child on beaches and promenades, whose names she could no longer even remember. And the only fixed world she knew was the world of the aunt who talked incessantly of the plush, camphor-smelling splendor of a New York which no longer existed.

Olivia saw it all clearly now. She saw why it was that when Anson Pentland came one night to call upon her aunt she had thought him an elegant and fascinating man whose presence at dinner had the power of transforming the solid walnut and mahogany dining-room into a brilliant place. He was what girls called “an older man,” and he had flattered her by his politeness and attentions. He had even taken her chaperoned by the aunt, to see a performance of “The City,” little knowing that the indecorousness to be unfolded there would force them to leave before the play was over. They had gone on a Thursday evening (she could even remember the very day) and she still smiled at the memory of their belief that a girl who had spent all her life in the corridors of European hotels should not know what the play was about.

And then it had all ended by her being asked to Pentlands for a visit ... to Pentlands, where she had come upon a world such as she had never known before, a world green and peaceful and secure, where every one was elaborately kind to her for reasons that she never learned until long afterward. They never even told her the truth about Anson’s mother, the old woman who lived in solitude in the north wing. She was, they said, too ill at the moment to see any one. Pentlands, in that far-off day, had seemed to the tired, friendless girl like some vast, soft green bed where she could fling herself down and rest forever, a world where she could make friends and send down roots that would hold her secure for all time. To a hotel child Pentlands was a paradise; so when Anson Pentland asked her to marry him, she accepted him because she did not find him actually repulsive.

And now, after all those years, it was spring again ... spring as when she had come to Pentlands for the first time, and she was thirty-nine years old and still young; only everything had changed.

Bit by bit, in the years that followed the birth of Sybil and then of Jack, the whole picture of the life at Pentlands and in the brownstone house on Beacon Street had come to assume a pattern, to take form out of the first confused and misty impressions, so that, looking back upon it, she was beginning to understand it all with the chill clarity of disillusion.

She saw herself as a shy young girl to whom they had all been elaborately kind because it was so necessary for Anson to have a wife and produce an heir.... Anson, the last male descendant of such a glorious family. (“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”) She saw herself as they must have seen her ... a pretty young girl, disarmed by their kindness, who was not known in their world but was at least charming and a lady and quite rich. (She knew now how much the money must have counted with Aunt Cassie.) And she saw Anson now, across all the expanse of years, not as a Prince Charming come to rescue her from an ogre aunt, but as he had really been ... a rather anemic man, past thirty, of an appalling propriety. (There was a bitter humor in the memories of his timid advances toward her, of all the distaste with which he approached the details of marriage ... a humor which she had come to understand fully only as she grew older and wiser in the ways of the world.) Looking back, she saw him as a man who had tried again and again to marry young women he had known all his life and who had failed because somehow he had gained a mysterious reputation for being a bore ... a young man who, left to himself, would never have approached any woman, and gone to the grave as virginal as he had been born.

She saw now that he had never been even in the slightest in love with her. He had married her only because he got no peace from all the others, both the living and the dead, who in such a strange fashion seemed also to live at Pentlands. It was Aunt Cassie and even poor silly Miss Peavey and powerful old John Pentland and the cousins and all those dead hanging in neat rows in the hall who had married her. Anson had only been an instrument; and even in the most bitter moments she felt strangely sorry for him, because he, too, had had all his life ruined.

And so, slowly during all those long years, the pretty, shy, unknown Olivia McConnel, whose father was a Democratic politician out of Chicago, had turned into this puzzled, sometimes unhappy woman, the outsider, who had come in some mysterious fashion to be the one upon whom all of them leaned for strength.

She was glad now that she had stood forth boldly at last and faced Anson and all those who stood behind him there in the drawing-room, both the living and the dead, peering over his shoulder, urging him on. The unpleasant argument, though it had wounded her, had cleared the air a little. It had laid bare for a second the reality which she had been seeking for so long a time. Anson had been right about Sabine: in the clear bright air of the New England morning she knew that it was the sense of Sabine’s nearness which had given her the strength to be unpleasant. Sabine, like herself, had known the great world, and so she was able to see their world here in Durham with a clarity that the others never approached. She was strong, too, in her knowledge that whatever happened she (Olivia) was the one person whom they could not afford to lose, because they had depended on her for too long.

But she was hurt. She kept thinking again and again of what Anson had said.... “In any case, I will not have my daughter marry a shanty Irishman. There is enough of that in the family.”

She knew that Anson would suffer from shame for what he had said, but she knew, too, that he would pretend nothing had happened, that he had never made such a speech, because it was unworthy of a gentleman and a Pentland. He would pretend, as he always did, that the scene had never occurred.

When he had made the speech he had meant that she ought to have been thankful that they allowed her to marry into the Pentland family. There was a buried something in them all, a conviction that was a part of their very flesh, which made them believe in such a privilege. And for her who knew so much more than the world knew, who saw so much more than any of them of the truth, there was only one answer, to be wrung from her with a tragic intensity ... “Oh, my God!...”

3

The dining-room was large and square, and having been redecorated in a period later than the rest of the house, was done in heavy mahogany, with a vast shiny table in the center which when reduced to its smallest possible circumference still left those who seated themselves about it formally remote from one another.

It was a well-used table, for since circumstance had kept John Pentland from going into the world, he had brought a part of it into his own home with a hospitality and a warmth that rather upset his sister Cassie. She, herself, like most of the family, had never cared very profoundly for food, looking upon it almost as a necessity. A prune to her palate shared importance as a delicacy with a truffle. In the secrecy of her own house, moved by her passion for economy, she more often than not assuaged her own birdlike appetite with scraps from the cupboard, though at such times the simple but full-blooded Miss Peavey suffered keenly. “A pick-up meal” was a byword with Aunt Cassie, and so she frowned upon the rich food furnished by old John Pentland and his daughter-in-law, Olivia.

Nevertheless, she took a great many meals at the mahogany table and even managed to insinuate within its circle the plump figure of Miss Peavey, whose silly laugh and servile echoes of his sister’s opinions the old man detested.

Anson never lunched at home, for he went up to Boston each morning at nine o’clock, like a man of affairs, with much business to care for. He kept an office in Water Street and went to it with a passionate regularity, to spend the day in the petty affairs of club committees and societies for the improvement of this or that; for he was a man who fortified his own soul by arranging the lives of others. He was chairman of a committee which “aired” young girls who had fallen into trouble, and contributed as much as he was able out of his own rather slender income to the activities of the Watch and Ward Society. And a large part of the day was spent in correspondence with genealogists on the subject of “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He did not in a whole year earn enough money to pay the office rent for one month, but he had no patience with the many cases of poverty and destitution which came to his notice. The stocks and bonds of the Pentland estate had been kept carefully out of his reach, by a father who distrusted activities such as Anson’s, and even now, when he was nearly fifty, Anson had only a small income left by his grandfather and an allowance, paid him each month by his father, as if he were still a boy in college.

So when Olivia came down to lunch on the day after the ball she was not forced to face Anson and his shame over the scene of the night before. There were only the grandfather and Sybil and Jack—who was well enough to come down.

The old man sat at the head, in the place which he had never relinquished as the dictator, the ruler of all the family. Tall and muscular, he had grown leathery from exposure during the years he had lived in the country, riding day after day in rains and blizzards, in sunlight and in storms, as if there were in him some atavistic hunger for the hardy life led by the first Pentlands to come to Durham. He always rode the vicious and unruly beautiful red mare ... a grim old man who was a match for her famous bad temper. He was rather like his sister Cassie in appearance—one of the black Pentlands who had appeared mysteriously in the line nearly a hundred years earlier, and he had burning black eyes that looked out from shaggy brows ... a man as different in appearance and vigor from his son as it was possible to imagine. (For Anson was a typical Pentland—blond, with round blue eyes and an inclination when in health toward ruddiness.) One stood in awe of the old man: there was a grimness about the strong, rough-cut face and contracted lips, and a curious, indefinable air of disapproval which one was never able to pin down or analyze.

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.

4

As she left the room to follow him she stopped for a moment to say to Sybil, “Are you happy, my dear? You’re not sorry that you aren’t going back to school in Saint-Cloud?”

“No, Mama; why shouldn’t I be happy here? I love it, more than anything in the world.”

The girl thrust her hands into the pockets of her riding-coat.

“You don’t think I was wrong to send you to France to school ... away from every one here?”

Sybil laughed and looked at her mother in the frank, half-mocking way she had when she fancied she had uncovered a plot.

“Are you worrying about marrying me off? I’m only eighteen. I’ve lots of time.”

“I’m worrying because I think you’ll be so hard to please.”

Again she laughed. “That’s true. That’s why I’m going to take my time.”

“And you’re glad to have Thérèse here?”

“Of course. You know I like Thérèse awfully, Mama.”

“Very well ... run along now. I must speak to your grandfather.”

And the girl went out onto the terrace where Jack stood waiting in the sun for the trap. He always followed the sun, choosing to sit in it even in midsummer, as if he were never quite warm enough.

She was worried over Sybil. She had begun to think that perhaps Aunt Cassie was right when she said that Sybil ought to go to a boarding-school with the girls she had always known, to grow loud and noisy and awkward and play hockey and exchange silly notes with the boys in the boarding-school in the next village. Perhaps it was wrong to have sent Sybil away to a school where she would meet girls from France and England and Russia and South America ... half the countries of the world; a school where, as Aunt Cassie had said bitterly, she would be forced to associate with the “daughters of dancers and opera singers.” She knew now that Sybil hadn’t liked the ball any more than Thérèse, who had run away from it without a word of explanation. Only with Thérèse it didn’t matter so much, because the dark stubborn head was filled with all sorts of wild notions about science and painting and weird books on psychology. There was a loneliness about Thérèse and her mother, Sabine Callendar, only with them it didn’t matter. They had, too, a hardness, a sense of derision and scorn which protected them. Sybil hadn’t any such protections. Perhaps she was even wrong in having made of Sybil a lady—a lady in the old sense of the word—because there seemed to be no place for a lady in the scheme of life as it had existed at the dance the night before. It was perilous, having a lady on one’s hands, especially a lady who was certain to take life as passionately as Sybil.

She wanted the girl to be happy, without quite understanding that it was because Sybil seemed the girl she had once been herself, a very part of herself, the part which had never lived at all.

She found her father-in-law seated at his great mahogany desk in the high narrow room walled with books which was kept sacred to him, at the desk from which he managed the farm and watched over a fortune, built up bit by bit shrewdly, thriftily over three hundred years, a fortune which he had never brought himself to trust in the hands of his son. It was, in its gloomy, cold way, a pleasant room, smelling of dogs and apples and wood-smoke, and sometimes of whisky, for it was here that the old man retired when, in a kind of baffled frenzy, he drank himself to insensibility. It was here that he would sometimes sit for a day and a night, even sleeping in his leather chair, refusing to see any one save Higgins, who watched over him, and Olivia. And so it was Olivia and Higgins who alone knew the spectacle of this solitary drinking. The world and even the family knew very little of it—only the little which sometimes leaked out from the gossip of servants straying at night along the dark lanes and hedges about Durham.

He sat with his coffee and a glass of Courvoisier before him while he smoked, with an air of being lost in some profound worry, for he did not look up at once when she entered, but sat staring before him in an odd, enchanted fashion. It was not until she had taken a cigarette from the silver box and lighted it that he looked up at the sound of the striking match and, focusing the burning black eyes, said to her, “Jack seems very well to-day.”

“Yes, better than he has been in a long time.”

“Perhaps, after all, the doctors are wrong.”

Olivia sighed and said quietly, “If we had believed the doctors we should have lost him long ago.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

She poured her coffee and he murmured, “It’s about Horace Pentland I wanted to speak. He’s dead. I got the news this morning. He died in Mentone and now it’s a question whether we shall bring him home here to be buried in Durham with the rest of the family.”

Olivia was silent for a moment and then, looking up, said, “What do you think? How long has it been that he has lived in Mentone?”

“It’s nearly thirty years now that I’ve been sending him money to stay there. He’s only a cousin. Still, we had the same grandfather and he’d be the first of the family in three hundred years who isn’t buried here.”

“There was Savina Pentland....”

“Yes.... But she’s buried out there, and she would have been buried here if it had been possible.”

And he made a gesture in the direction of the sea, beyond the marshes where the beautiful Savina Pentland, almost a legend now, lay, somewhere deep down in the soft white sand at the bottom of the ocean.

“Would he want to be buried here?” asked Olivia.

“He wrote and asked me ... a month or two before he died. It seemed to be on his mind. He put it in a strange way. He wrote that he wanted to come home.”

Again Olivia was thoughtful for a time. “Strange ...” she murmured presently, “when people were so cruel to him.”

The lips of the old man stiffened a little.

“It was his own fault....”

“Still ... thirty years is a long time.”

He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. “You mean that everything may have been forgotten by now?”

Olivia made a little gesture with her white, ringless hands. “Why not?”

“Because people don’t forget things like that ... not in our world, at any rate.”

Quietly, far back in her mind, Olivia kept trying to imagine this Horace Pentland whom she had never seen, this shadowy old man, dead now, who had been exiled for thirty years.

“You have no reason for not wanting him here among all the others?”

“No ... Horace is dead now.... It can’t matter much whether what’s left of him is buried here or in France.”

“Except, of course, that they may have been kinder to him over there.... They’re not so harsh.”

A silence fell over them, as if in some way the spirit of Horace Pentland, the sinner whose name was never spoken in the family save between Olivia and the old man, had returned and stood between them, waiting to hear what was to be done with all that remained of him on this earth. It was one of those silences which, descending upon the old house, sometimes filled Olivia with a vague uneasiness. They had a way of descending upon the household in the long evenings when all the family sat reading in the old drawing-room—as if there were figures unseen who stood watching.

“If he wanted to be buried here,” said Olivia, “I can see no reason why he should not be.”

“Cassie will object to raking up an old scandal that has been forgotten.”

“Surely that can’t matter now ... when the poor old man is dead. We can be kind to him now ... surely we can be kind to him now.”

John Pentland sighed abruptly, a curious, heart-breaking sigh that seemed to have escaped even his power of steely control; and presently he said, “I think you are right, Olivia.... I will do as you say ... only we’ll keep it a secret between us until the time comes when it’s necessary to speak. And then ... then we’ll have a quiet funeral.”

She would have left him then save that she knew from his manner that there were other things he wanted to say. He had a way of letting you know his will without speaking. Somehow, in his presence you felt that it was impossible to leave until he had dismissed you. He still treated his own son, who was nearly fifty, as if he were a little boy.

Olivia waited, busying herself by rearranging the late lilacs which stood in a tall silver vase on the polished mahogany desk.

“They smell good,” he said abruptly. “They’re the last, aren’t they?”

“The last until next spring.”

“Next spring ...” he repeated with an air of speaking to himself. “Next spring....” And then abruptly, “The other thing was about Sabine. The nurse tells me she has discovered that Sabine is here.” He made the family gesture toward the old north wing. “She has asked to see Sabine.”

“Who told her that Sabine had returned? How could she have discovered it?”

“The nurse doesn’t know. She must have heard some one speaking the name under her window. The nurse says that people in her condition have curious ways of discovering such things ... like a sixth sense.”

“Do you want me to ask Sabine? She’d come if I asked her.”

“It would be unpleasant. Besides, I think it might do harm in some way.”

Olivia was silent for a moment. “How? She probably wouldn’t remember Sabine. When she saw her last, Sabine was a young girl.”

“She’s gotten the idea now that we’re all against her, that we’re persecuting her in some way.” He coughed and blew a cloud of smoke out of his thin-drawn lips. “It’s difficult to explain what I mean.... I mean that Sabine might encourage that feeling ... quite without meaning to, that Sabine might give her the impression that she was an ally. There’s something disturbing about Sabine.”

“Anson thinks so, too,” said Olivia softly. “He’s been talking to me about it.”

“She ought never to have come back here. It’s difficult ... what I am trying to say. Only I feel that she’s up to some mischief. I think she hates us all.”

“Not all of us....”

“Not perhaps you. You never belonged here. It’s only those of us who have always been here.”

“But she’s fond of you....”

“Her father and I were good friends. He was very like her ... disagreeable and given to speaking unpleasant truths.... He wasn’t a popular man. Perhaps that’s why she’s friendly toward me ... on account of him.”

“No, it’s more than that....”

Slowly Olivia felt herself slipping back into that state of confused enchantment which had overwhelmed her more and more often of late. It seemed that life grew more and more tenuous and complicated, more blurred and indistinct, until at times it became simply a morass of minute problems in which she found herself mired and unable to act. No one spoke directly any more. It was like living in a world of shadows. And this old man, her father-in-law, was the greatest puzzle of all, because it was impossible ever to know how much he understood of what went on about him, how much he chose to ignore in the belief that by denying its existence it would cease to exist.

Sitting there, puzzled, she began to pull a leaf from the cluster of lilacs into tiny bits.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I think Sabine is unhappy....”

“No ... not that.... She’s beyond happiness or unhappiness. There’s something hard in her and unrelenting ... as hard as a cut diamond. She’s a clever woman and a queer one. She’s one of those strange creatures that are thrown off now and then by people like us. There’s nothing else quite like them in the world. They go to strange extremes. Horace was the same ... in a different, less creditable fashion.”

Olivia looked at him suddenly, astonished by the sudden flash of penetration in the old man, one of those sudden, quick gleams which led her to believe that far down, in the depths of his soul, he was far more profound, far more intelligent, unruly and defiant of tradition than he ever allowed the world to suppose. It was always the old question. How much did he know? How much did he not know ... far back, behind the lined, severe, leathery old face? Or was it a sort of clairvoyance, not of eternal illness, like Jack’s, but of old age?

“I shall ask Sabine,” she began.

“It’s not necessary at the moment. She appears to have forgotten the matter temporarily. But she’ll remember it again and then I think it will be best to humor her, whatever comes. She may not think of it again for months ... until Sabine has gone.... I only wanted to ask you ... to consult you, Olivia. I thought you could arrange it.”

She rose and, turning to go, she heard him saying, “She might like some lilacs in her room.” He hesitated and in a flat, dead voice, added, “She used to be very fond of flowers.”

Olivia, avoiding the dark eyes, thought, “She used to be very fond of flowers.... That means forty years ago ... forty long years. Oh, my God!” But after a second she said simply, “She has taken a dislike to flowers. She fancies they take up the air and stifle her. The sight of them is very bad for her.”

“I should have known you’d already thought of it.”

For an instant the old man stood facing her with a fixed and searching expression which made her feel shy and led her to turn away from him a little; and then all at once, with an air strangely timid and frightened in a man so grim in appearance, he took her hand and kissing her on the forehead murmured, “You’re a good girl, Olivia. They’re right in what they say of you. You’re a good girl. I don’t know how I should have managed without you all these years.”

Smiling, she looked at him, and then, touching his hand affectionately, she went out without speaking again, thinking, as she had thought a thousand times, what a terrible thing it must be to have been born so inarticulate and so terrified of feeling as John Pentland. It must be, she thought, like living forever imprisoned in a shell of steel from which one might look out and see friends but never touch or know them.

From the doorway she heard a voice behind her, saying almost joyfully: “The doctors must have been wrong about Jack. You and I together, Olivia, have defeated them.”

She said, “Yes,” and smiled at him, but when she had turned away again there was in her mind a strange, almost gruesome thought.

“If only Jack lives until his grandfather is dead, the old man will die happy. If only he can be kept alive until then....”

She had a strange way of seeing things in the hard light of reality, and an unreal, lonely childhood had fostered the trait. She had been born thus, and now as a woman she found that in a way it was less a curse than a blessing. In a world which survived only by deceiving itself, she found that seeing the truth and knowing it made her strong. Here, perhaps, lay the reason why all of them had come to depend upon her. But there were times, too, when she wanted passionately to be a poor weak feminine creature, a woman who might turn to her husband and find in him some one stronger than herself. She had a curious feeling of envy for Savina Pentland, who was dead before she was born.... Savina Pentland who had been the beauty of the family, extravagant, reckless, feminine, who bought strings of pearls and was given to weeping and fainting.

But she (Olivia) had only Anson to lean upon.

After she had gone away the old man sat for a long time smoking and drinking his brandy, enveloped by a loneliness scarcely more profound than it had been a little while before when he sat talking with Olivia. It was his habit to sit thus sometimes for an hour at a time, unconscious, it seemed, of all the world about him; Olivia had come in more than once at such moments and gone away again, unwilling to shatter the enchantment by so much as a single word.

At last, when the cigar had burned to an end, he crushed out the ember with a short, fierce gesture and, rising, went out of the tall narrow room and along the corridor that led to the dark stairway in the old north wing. These steps he had climbed every day since it had become necessary to keep her in the country the year round ... every day, at the same hour, step by step his big heavy-shod boots had trod the same worn stair carpet. It was a journey begun years ago as a kind of pleasure colored by hope, which for a long time now, bereft of all hope, had become merely a monotonous dreary duty. It was like a journey of penance made by some pilgrim on his knees up endless flights of stairs.

For more than twenty years, as far back as Olivia could remember, he had been absent from the house for a night but twice, and then only on occasions of life and death. In all that time he had been twice to New York and never once to the Europe he had not seen since, as a boy, he had made the grand tour on a plan laid out by old General Curtis ... a time so remote now that it must have seemed part of another life. In all those years he had never once escaped from the world which his family found so perfect and complete and which to him must have seemed always a little cramped and inadequate. Fate and blood and circumstance, one might have said, had worn him down bit by bit until in the end he had come to worship the same gods they worshiped. Now and then he contrived to escape them for a little while by drinking himself into insensibility, but always he awakened again to find that nothing had changed, to discover that his prison was the same. And so, slowly, hope must have died.

But no one knew, even Olivia, whether he was happy or unhappy; and no one would ever really know what had happened to him, deep inside, behind the gray, leathery old face.

The world said, when it thought of him: “There never was such a devoted husband as John Pentland.”

Slowly and firmly he walked along the narrow hall to the end and there halted to knock on the white door. He always knocked, for there were times when the sight of him, entering suddenly, affected her so that she became hysterical and beyond all control.

In response to the knock, the door was opened gently and professionally by Miss Egan, an automaton of a nurse—neat, efficient, inhuman and incredibly starched, whose very smile seemed to come and go by some mechanical process, like the sounds made by squeezing a mechanical doll. Only it was impossible to imagine squeezing anything so starched and jagged as the red-faced Miss Egan. It was a smile which sprang into existence upon sight of any member of the family, a smile of false humility which said, “I know very well that you cannot do without me”—the smile of a woman well enough content to be paid three times the wages of an ordinary nurse. In three or four more years she would have enough saved to start a sanatorium of her own.

Fixing her smile, she faced the old man, saying, “She seems quite well to-day ... very quiet.”

The whole hallway had been flooded at the opening of the door by a thick and complicated odor arising from innumerable medicines that stood row upon row in the obscurity of the dark room. The old man stepped inside, closing the door quickly behind him, for she was affected by too much light. She could not bear to have a door or a window open near her; even on this bright day the drawn shades kept the room in darkness.

She had got the idea somehow that there were people outside who waited to leer at her ... hundreds of them all pressing their faces against the panes to peep into her bedroom. There were days when she could not be quieted until the window-shades were covered by thick layers of black cloth. She would not rise from her bed until nightfall lest the faces outside might see her standing there in her nightdress.

It was only when darkness had fallen that the nurse was able by means of trickery and wheedling to air the room, and so it smelled horribly of the medicines she never took, but kept ranged about her, row upon row, like the fetishes of witch-doctors. In this they humored her as they had humored her in shutting out the sunlight, because it was the only way they could keep her quiet and avoid sending her away to some place where she would have been shut behind bars. And this John Pentland would not even consider.

When he entered she was lying in the bed, her thin, frail body barely outlined beneath the bedclothes ... the mere shadow of a woman who must once have been pretty in a delicate way. But nothing remained now of the beauty save the fine modeling of the chin and nose and brow. She lay there, a queer, unreal old woman, with thin white hair, skin like parchment and a silly, vacant face as unwrinkled as that of a child. As he seated himself beside her, the empty, round blue eyes opened a little and stared at him without any sign of recognition. He took one of the thin, blue-veined hands in his, but it only lay there, lifeless, while he sat, silent and gentle, watching her.

Once he spoke, calling her wistfully by name, “Agnes”; but there was no sign of an answer, not so much as a faint flickering of the white, transparent lids.

And so for an eternity he sat thus in the thick darkness, enveloped by the sickly odor of medicines, until he was roused by a knock at the door and the sudden glare of daylight as it opened and Miss Egan, fixing her flashing and teethy smile, came in and said: “The fifteen minutes is up, Mr. Pentland.”

When the door had closed behind him he went away again, slowly, thoughtfully, down the worn stairs and out into the painfully brilliant sunlight of the bright New England spring. Crossing the green terrace, bordered with great clumps of iris and peonies and a few late tulips, he made his way to the stable-yard, where Higgins had left the red mare in charge of a Polish boy who did odd tasks about the farm. The mare, as beautiful and delicate as a fine steel spring, stood nervously pawing the gravel and tossing her handsome head. The boy, a great lout with a shock of yellow hair, stood far away from her holding the reins at arm’s length.

At the sight of the two the old man laughed and said, “You mustn’t let her know you’re afraid of her, Ignaz.”

The boy gave up the reins and retired to a little distance, still watching the mare resentfully. “Well, she tried to bite me!” he said sullenly.

Quickly, with a youthful agility, John Pentland swung himself to her back ... quickly enough to keep her from sidling away from him. There was a short, fierce struggle between the rider and the horse, and in a shower of stones they sped away down the lane that led across the meadows, past the thicket of black pines and the abandoned gravel-pit, toward the house of Mrs. Soames.

CHAPTER IV

In the solid corner of the world which surrounded Durham, Aunt Cassie played the rôle of an unofficial courier who passed from house to house, from piazza to piazza, collecting and passing on the latest bits of news. When one saw a low cloud of dust moving across the brilliant New England sky above the hedges and stone walls of the countryside, one could be certain that it masked the progress of Cassie Struthers on her daily round of calls. She went always on foot, because she detested motors and was terrified of horses; one might see her coming from a great distance, dressed always in dingy black, tottering along very briskly (for a woman of her age and well-advertised infirmities). One came to expect her arrival at a certain hour, for she was, unless there arose in her path some calamity or piece of news of unusual interest, a punctual woman whose life was as carefully ordered as the vast house in which she lived with the queer Aunt Bella.

It was a great box of a dwelling built by the late Mr. Struthers in the days of cupolas and gazebos on land given him by Aunt Cassie’s grandfather on the day of her wedding. Inside it was furnished with a great profusion of plush tassels and antimacassars, all kept with the neatness and rigidity of a museum. There were never any cigar ashes on the floor, nor any dust in the corners, for Aunt Cassie followed her servants about with the eye of a fussy old sergeant inspecting his barracks. Poor Miss Peavey, who grew more and more dowdy and careless as old age began to settle over her, led a life of constant peril, and was forced to build a little house near the stables to house her Pomeranians and her Siamese cats. For Aunt Cassie could not abide the thought of “the animals dirtying up the house.” Even the “retiring room” of the late Mr. Struthers had been converted since his death into a museum, spotless and purified of tobacco and whisky, where his chair sat before his desk, turned away from it a little, as if his spirit were still seated there. On the desk lay his pipe (as he had left it) and the neat piles of paper (carefully dusted each day but otherwise undisturbed) which he had put there with his own hand on the morning they found him seated on the chair, his head fallen back a little, as if asleep. And in the center of the desk lay two handsomely bound volumes—“Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards”—which he had written in these last sad years when his life seemed slowly to fade from him ... the years in which Aunt Cassie seemed rapidly to recover the wiry strength and health for which she had been famous as a girl.

The house, people said, had been built by Mr. Struthers in the expectation of a large family, but it had remained great and silent of children’s voices as a tomb since the day it was finished, for Aunt Cassie had never been strong until it was too late for her to bear him heirs.

Sabine Callendar had a whole set of theories about the house and about the married life of Aunt Cassie, but they were theories which she kept, in her way, entirely to herself, waiting and watching until she was certain of them. There was a hatred between the two women that was implacable and difficult to define, an emotion almost of savagery which concealed itself beneath polite phrases and casual observations of an acid character. They encountered each other more frequently than Aunt Cassie would have wished, for Sabine, upon her return to Durham, took up Aunt Cassie’s habit of going from house to house on foot in search of news and entertainment. They met in drawing-rooms, on piazzas, and sometimes in the very dusty lanes, greeting each other with smiles and vicious looks. They had become rather like two hostile cats watching each other for days at a time, stealthily. Sabine, Aunt Cassie confided in Olivia, made her nervous.

Still, it was Aunt Cassie who had been the first caller at Brook Cottage after the arrival of Sabine. The younger woman had seen her approach, enveloped in a faint cloud of dust, from the windows of Brook Cottage, and the sight filled her with an inexpressible delight. The spare old lady had come along so briskly, almost with impatience, filled with delight (Sabine believed) at having an excuse now to trespass on O’Hara’s land and see what he had done to the old cottage. And Sabine believed, too, that she came to discover what life had done to “dear Mr. Struthers’ niece, Sabine Callendar.” She came as the Official Welcomer of the Community, with hope in her heart that she would find Sabine a returned prodigal, a wrecked woman, ravaged by time and experience, who for twenty years had ignored them all and now returned, a broken and humbled creature, hungry for kindness.

The sight set fire to a whole train of memories in Sabine ... memories which penetrated deep into her childhood when with her father she had lived in the old house that once stood where O’Hara’s new one raised its bright chimneys; memories of days when she had run off by herself to play in the tangled orchard grass among the bleeding-hearts and irises that surrounded this same Brook Cottage where she stood watching the approach of Aunt Cassie. Only, in those days Brook Cottage had been a ruin of a place, with empty windows and sagging doors, ghostly and half-hidden by a shaggy tangle of lilacs and syringas, and now it stood glistening with new paint, the lilacs all neatly clipped and pruned.

There was something in the sight of the old woman’s nervous, active figure that struck deep down into a past which Sabine, with the passing of years, had almost succeeded in forgetting; and now it all came back again, sharply and with a kind of stabbing pain, so that she had a sudden odd feeling of having become a little girl again ... plain, red-haired, freckled and timid, who stood in terror of Aunt Cassie and was always being pulled here and there by a thousand aunts and uncles and cousins because she would not be turned into their idea of what a nice little girl ought to be. It was as if the whole past were concentrated in the black figure of the old lady who had been the ring-leader, the viceroy, of all a far-flung tribe, an old woman who had been old even twenty years earlier, lying always on a sofa under a shawl, issuing her edicts, pouring out her ample sympathies, her bitter criticisms. And here she was, approaching briskly, as if the death of Mr. Struthers had somehow released her from bonds which had chafed for too long.

Watching her, one incident after another flashed through the quick, hard brain of Sabine, all recreated with a swift, astounding clarity—the day when she had run off to escape into the world and been found by old John Pentland hiding in the thicket of white birches happily eating blueberries. (She could see his countenance now, stern with its disapproval of such wild behavior, but softening, too, at the sight of the grubby, freckled plain face stained with blueberry juice.) And the return of the captive, when she was surrounded by aunts who dressed her in a clean frock and forced her to sit in the funereal spare bedroom with a New Testament on her knees until she “felt that she could come out and behave like a nice, well-brought-up little girl.” She could see the aunts pulling and fussing at her and saying, “What a shame she didn’t take after her mother in looks!” and, “She’ll have a hard time with such plain, straight red hair.”

And there was, too, the memory of that day when Anson Pentland, a timid, spiritless little Lord Fauntleroy of a boy, fell into the river and would have been drowned save for his cousin Sabine, who dragged him out, screaming and drenched, only to receive for herself all the scolding for having led him into mischief. And the times when she had been punished for having asked frank and simple questions which she ought not to have asked.

It was difficult to remember any happiness until the day when her father died and she was sent to New York, a girl of twenty, knowing very little of anything and nothing whatever of such things as love and marriage, to live with an uncle in a tall narrow house on Murray Hill. It was on that day (she saw it now with a devastating clarity as she stood watching the approach of Aunt Cassie) that her life had really begun. Until then her existence had been only a confused and tormented affair in which there was very little happiness. It was only later that reality had come to her, painfully, even tragically, in a whole procession of events which had made her slowly into this hard, worldly, cynical woman who found herself, without quite knowing why, back in a world she hated, standing at the window of Brook Cottage, a woman tormented by an immense and acutely living curiosity about people and the strange tangles which their lives sometimes assumed.

She had been standing by the window thinking back into the past with such a fierce intensity that she quite forgot the approach of Aunt Cassie and started suddenly at the sound of the curious, familiar thin voice, amazingly unchanged, calling from the hallway, “Sabine! Sabine dear! It’s your Aunt Cassie! Where are you?” as if she had never left Durham at all, as if nothing had changed in twenty years.

At sight of her, the old lady came forward with little fluttering cries to fling her arms about her late husband’s niece. Her manner was that of a shepherd receiving a lost sheep, a manner filled with forgiveness and pity and condescension. The tears welled easily into her eyes and streamed down her face.

Sabine permitted herself, frigidly, to be embraced, and said, “But you don’t look a day older, Aunt Cassie. You look stronger than ever.” It was a remark which somehow set the whole tone of the relationship between them, a remark which, though it sounded sympathetic and even complimentary, was a harsh thing to say to a woman who had cherished all her life the tradition of invalidism. It was harsh, too, because it was true. Aunt Cassie at forty-seven had been as shriveled and dried as she was now, twenty years later.

The old woman said, “My dear girl, I am miserable ... miserable.” And drying the tears that streamed down her face, she added, “It won’t be long now until I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”

Sabine wanted suddenly to laugh, at the picture of Aunt Cassie entering Paradise to rejoin a husband whom she had always called, even in the intimacy of married life, “Mr. Struthers.” She kept thinking that Mr. Struthers might not find the reunion so pleasant as his wife anticipated. She had always held a strange belief that Mr. Struthers had chosen death as the best way out.

And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused by Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement. Aunt Cassie could never bring herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She must say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”

Sabine said, “Oh, no.... Oh, no.... Don’t say that.”

“I don’t sleep any more. I barely close my eyes at night.”

She had seated herself now and was looking about her, absorbing everything in the room, the changes made by the dreadful O’Hara, the furniture he had bought for the house. But most of all she was studying Sabine, devouring her with sidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine, knowing her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent shock. She had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she had found instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman, superbly dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight red hair the aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin slippers—a woman who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand and subdued it, who was in a way complete.

“Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you.” And again the easy tears welled up.

(“Oh,” thought Sabine, “you don’t catch me that way. You won’t put me back where I once was. You won’t even have a chance to meddle in my life.”)

Aloud she said, “It’s a pity I’ve always been so far away.”

“But I’ve thought of you, my dear.... I’ve thought of you. Scarcely a night passes when I don’t say to myself before going to sleep, ‘There is poor Sabine out in the world, turning her back on all of us who love her.’” She sighed abysmally. “I have thought of you, dear. I’ve prayed for you in the long nights when I have never closed an eye.”

And Sabine, talking on half-mechanically, discovered slowly that, in spite of everything, she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie. She was no longer a shy, frightened, plain little girl; she even began to sense a challenge, a combat which filled her with a faint sense of warmth. She kept thinking, “She really hasn’t changed at all. She still wants to reach out and take possession of me and my life. She’s like an octopus reaching out and seizing each member of the family, arranging everything.” And she saw Aunt Cassie now, after so many years, in a new light. It seemed to her that there was something glittering and hard and a little sinister beneath all the sighing and tears and easy sympathy. Perhaps she (Sabine) was the only one in all the family who had escaped the reach of those subtle, insinuating tentacles.... She had run away.

Meanwhile Aunt Cassie had swept from a vivid and detailed description of the passing of Mr. Struthers into a catalogue of neighborhood and family calamities, of deaths, of broken troths, financial disasters, and the appearance on the horizon of the “dreadful O’Hara.” She reproached Sabine for having sold her land to such an outsider. And as she talked on and on she grew less and less human and more and more like some disembodied, impersonal force of nature. Sabine, watching her with piercing green eyes, found her a little terrifying. She had sharpened and hardened with age.

She discussed the divorces which had occurred in Boston, and at length, leaning forward and touching Sabine’s hand with her thin, nervous one, she said brokenly: “I felt for you in your trouble, Sabine. I never wrote you because it would have been so painful. I see now that I evaded my duty. But I felt for you.... I tried to put myself in your place. I tried to imagine dear Mr. Struthers being unfaithful to me ... but, of course, I couldn’t. He was a saint.” She blew her nose and repeated with passion, as if to herself, “A saint!”

(“Yes,” thought Sabine, “a saint ... if ever there was one.”) She saw that Aunt Cassie was attacking her now from a new point. She was trying to pity her. By being full of pity the old woman would try to break down her defenses and gain possession of her.

Sabine’s green eyes took one hard, glinting look. “Did you ever see my husband?” she asked.

“No,” said Aunt Cassie, “but I’ve heard a great deal of him. I’ve been told how you suffered.”

Sabine looked at her with a queer, mocking expression. “Then you’ve been told wrongly. He is a fascinating man. I did not suffer. I assure you that I would rather have shared him with fifty other women than have had any one of the men about here all to myself.”

There was a frank immorality in this statement which put Aunt Cassie to rout, bag and baggage. She merely stared, finding nothing to say in reply to such a speech. Clearly, in all her life she had never heard any one say a thing so bald and so frank, so completely naked of all pretense of gentility.

Sabine went on coldly, pushing her assault to the very end. “I divorced him at last, not because he was unfaithful to me, but because there was another woman who wanted to marry him ... a woman whom I respect and like ... a woman who is still my friend. Understand that I loved him passionately ... in a very fleshly way. One couldn’t help it. I wasn’t the only woman.... He was a kind of devil, but a very fascinating one.”

The old woman was a little stunned but not by any means defeated. Sabine saw a look come into her eyes, a look which clearly said, “So this is what the world has done to my poor, dear, innocent little Sabine!” At last she said with a sigh, “I find it an amazing world. I don’t know what it is coming to.”

“Nor I,” replied Sabine with an air of complete agreement and sympathy. She understood that the struggle was not yet finished, for Aunt Cassie had a way of putting herself always in an impregnable position, of wrapping herself in layer after layer of sighs and sympathy, of charity and forgiveness, of meekness and tears, so that in the end there was no way of suddenly tearing them aside and saying, “There you are ... naked at last, a horrible meddling old woman!” And Sabine kept thinking, too, that if Aunt Cassie had lived in the days of her witch-baiting ancestor, Preserved Pentland, she would have been burned for a witch.

And all the while Sabine had been suffering, quietly, deep inside, behind the frankly painted face ... suffering in a way which no one in the world had ever suspected; for it was like tearing out her heart, to talk thus of Richard Callendar, even to speak his name.

Aloud she said, “And how is Mrs. Pentland.... I mean Olivia ... not my cousin.... I know how she is ... no better.”

“No better.... It is one of those things which I can never understand.... Why God should have sent such a calamity to a good man like my brother.”

“But Olivia ...” began Sabine, putting an end abruptly to what was clearly the prelude to a pious monologue.

“Oh!... Olivia,” replied Aunt Cassie, launching into an account of the young Mrs. Pentland. “Olivia is an angel ... an angel, a blessing of God sent to my poor brother. But she’s not been well lately. She’s been rather sharp with me ... even with poor Miss Peavey, who is so sensitive. I can’t imagine what has come over her.”

It seemed that the strong, handsome Olivia was suffering from nerves. She was, Aunt Cassie said, unhappy about something, although she could not see why Olivia shouldn’t be happy ... a woman with everything in the world.

“Everything?” echoed Sabine. “Has any one in the world got everything?”

“It is Olivia’s fault if she hasn’t everything. All the materials are there. She has a good husband ... a husband who never looks at other women.”

“Nor at his own wife either,” interrupted Sabine. “I know all about Anson. I grew up with him.”

Aunt Cassie saw fit to ignore this. “She’s rich,” she said, resuming the catalogue of Olivia’s blessings.

And again Sabine interrupted, “But what does money mean Aunt Cassie? In our world one is rich and that’s the end of it. One takes it for granted. When one isn’t rich any longer, one simply slips out of it. It has very little to do with happiness....”

The strain was beginning to show on Aunt Cassie. “You’d find out if you weren’t rich,” she observed with asperity, “if your father and great-grandfather hadn’t taken care of their money.” She recovered herself and made a deprecating gesture. “But don’t think I’m criticizing dear Olivia. She is the best, the most wonderful woman.” She began to wrap herself once more in kindliness and charity and forgiveness. “Only she seems to me to be a little queer lately.”

Sabine’s artificially crimson mouth took on a slow smile. “It would be too bad if the Pentland family drove two wives insane—one after the other.”

Again Aunt Cassie came near to defeat by losing her composure. She snorted, and Sabine helped her out by asking: “And Anson?” ironically. “What is dear Anson doing?”

She told him of Anson’s great work, “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” and of its immense value as a contribution to the history of the nation; and when she had finished with that, she turned to Jack’s wretched health, saying in a low, melancholy voice, “It’s only a matter of time, you know.... At least, so the doctors say.... With a heart like that it’s only a matter of time.” The tears came again.

“And yet,” Sabine said slowly, “You say that Olivia has everything.”

“Well,” replied Aunt Cassie, “perhaps not everything.”

Before she left she inquired for Sabine’s daughter and was told that she had gone over to Pentlands to see Sybil.

“They went to the same school in France,” said Sabine. “They were friends there.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I was against Sybil’s going abroad to school. It fills a girl’s head with queer ideas ... especially a school like that where any one could go. Since she’s home, Sybil behaves very queerly.... I think it’ll stand in the way of her success in Boston. The boys don’t like girls who are different.”

“Perhaps,” said Sabine, “she may marry outside of Boston. Men aren’t the same everywhere. Even in Boston there must be one or two who don’t refer to women as ‘Good old So-and-so.’ Even in Boston there must be men who like women who are well dressed ... women who are ladies....”

Aunt Cassie began to grow angry again, but Sabine swept over her. “Don’t be insulted, Aunt Cassie. I only mean ladies in the old-fashioned, glamorous sense..... Besides,” she continued, “whom could she marry who wouldn’t be a cousin or a connection of some sort?”

“She ought to marry here ... among the people she’s always known. There’s a Mannering boy who would be a good match, and James Thorne’s youngest son.”

Sabine smiled. “So you have plans for her already. You’ve settled it?”

“Of course, nothing is settled. I’m only thinking of it with Sybil’s welfare in view. If she married one of those boys she’d know what she was getting. She’d know that she was marrying a gentleman.”

“Perhaps ...” said Sabine. “Perhaps.” Somehow a devil had taken possession of her and she added softly, “There was, of course, Horace Pentland.... One can never be quite sure.” (She never forgot anything, Sabine.)

And at the same moment she saw, standing outside the door that opened on the terrace next to the marshes, a solid, dark, heavy figure which she recognized with a sudden feeling of delight as O’Hara. He had been walking across the fields with the wiry little Higgins, who had left him and continued on his way down the lane in the direction of Pentlands. At the sight of him, Aunt Cassie made every sign of an attempt to escape quickly, but Sabine said in a voice ominous with sweetness, “You must meet Mr. O’Hara. I think you’ve never met him. He’s a charming man.” And she placed herself in such a position that it was impossible for the old woman to escape without losing every vestige of dignity.

Then Sabine called gently, “Come in, Mr. O’Hara.... Mrs. Struthers is here and wants so much to meet her new neighbor.”

The door opened and O’Hara stepped in, a swarthy, rather solidly built man of perhaps thirty-five, with a shapely head on which the vigorous black hair was cropped close, and with blue eyes that betrayed his Irish origin by the half-hidden sparkle of amusement at this move of Sabine’s. He had a strong jaw and full, rather sensual, lips and a curious sense of great physical strength, as if all his clothes were with difficulty modeled to the muscles that lay underneath. He wore no hat, and his skin was a dark tan, touched at the cheek-bones by the dull flush of health and good blood.

He was, one would have said at first sight, a common, vulgar man in that narrow-jawed world about Durham, a man, perhaps, who had come by his muscles as a dock-laborer. Sabine had thought him vulgar in the beginning, only to succumb in the end to a crude sort of power which placed him above the realm of such distinctions. And she was a shrewd woman, too, devoted passionately to the business of getting at the essence of people; she knew that vulgarity had nothing to do with a man who had eyes so shrewd and full of mockery.

He came forward quietly and with a charming air of deference in which there was a faint suspicion of nonsense, a curious shadow of vulgarity, only one could not be certain whether he was not being vulgar by deliberation.

“It is a great pleasure,” he said. “Of course, I have seen Mrs. Struthers many times ... at the horse shows ... the whippet races.”

Aunt Cassie was drawn up, stiff as a poker, with an air of having found herself unexpectedly face to face with a rattlesnake.

“I have had the same experience,” she said. “And of course I’ve seen all the improvements you have made here on the farm.” The word “improvements” she spoke with a sort of venom in it, as if it had been instead a word like “arson.”

“We’ll have some tea,” observed Sabine. “Sit down, Aunt Cassie.”

But Aunt Cassie did not unbend. “I promised Olivia to be back at Pentlands for tea,” she said. “And I am late already.” Pulling on her black gloves, she made a sudden dip in the direction of O’Hara. “We shall probably see each other again, Mr. O’Hara, since we are neighbors.”

“Indeed, I hope so....”

Then she kissed Sabine again and murmured, “I hope, my dear, that you will come often to see me, now that you’ve come back to us. Make my house your own home.” She turned to O’Hara, finding a use for him suddenly in her warfare against Sabine. “You know, Mr. O’Hara, she is a traitor, in her way. She was raised among us and then went away for twenty years. She hasn’t any loyalty in her.”

She made the speech with a stiff air of playfulness, as if, of course, she were only making a joke and the speech meant nothing at all. Yet the air was filled with a cloud of implications. It was the sort of tactics in which she excelled.

Sabine went with her to the door, and when she returned she discovered O’Hara standing by the window, watching the figure of Aunt Cassie as she moved indignantly down the road in the direction of Pentlands. Sabine stood there for a moment, studying the straight, strong figure outlined against the light, and she got suddenly a curious sense of the enmity between him and the old woman. They stood, the two of them, in a strange way as the symbols of two great forces—the one negative, the other intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of decay, the other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever reconcile them. According to the scheme of things, they would be implacable enemies to the end. But Sabine had no doubts as to the final victor; the same scheme of things showed small respect for all that Aunt Cassie stood for. That was one of the wisdoms Sabine had learned since she had escaped from Durham into the uncompromising realities of the great world.

When she spoke, she said in a noncommittal sort of voice, “Mrs. Struthers is a remarkable woman.”

And O’Hara, turning, looked at her with a sudden glint of humor in his blue eyes. “Extraordinary ... I’m sure of it.”

“And a powerful woman,” said Sabine. “Wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove. It is never good to underestimate such strength. And now.... How do you like your tea?”

He took no tea but contented himself with munching a bit of toast and afterward smoking a cigar, clearly pleased with himself in a naïve way in the rôle of landlord coming to inquire of his tenant whether everything was satisfactory. He had a liking for this hard, clever woman who was now only a tenant of the land—his land—which she had once owned. When he thought of it—that he, Michael O’Hara, had come to own this farm in the midst of the fashionable and dignified world of Durham—there was something incredible in the knowledge, something which never ceased to warm him with a strong sense of satisfaction. By merely turning his head, he could see in the mirror the reflection of the long scar on his temple, marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a youthful fight along the India Wharf. He, Michael O’Hara, without education save that which he had given himself, without money, without influence, had raised himself to this position before his thirty-sixth birthday. In the autumn he would be a candidate for Congress, certain of election in the back Irish districts. He, Michael O’Hara, was on his way to being one of the great men of New England, a country which had once been the tight little paradise of people like the Pentlands.

Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.

Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a microscope. She was finding out all about him; and he understood that, for it was a trick in which he, himself, was well-practised. It was by such methods that he had got ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too, that she should have come out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could be so utterly different from it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since ... that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.

They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of understanding unusual in two people who had known each other for so short a time; they spoke of the farm, of Pentlands, of the mills and the Poles in Durham, of the country as it had been in the days when Sabine was a child. And all the while he had that sense of her weighing and watching him, of feeling out the faint echo of a brogue in his speech and the rather hard, nasal quality that remained from those days along India Wharf and the memories of a ne’er-do-well, superstitious Irish father.

He could not have known that she was a woman who included among her friends men and women of a dozen nationalities, who lived a life among the clever, successful people of the world ... the architects, the painters, the politicians, the scientists. He could not have known the ruthless rule she put up against tolerating any but people who were “complete.” He could have known nothing of her other life in Paris, and London, and New York, which had nothing to do with the life in Durham and Boston. And yet he did know.... He saw that, despite the great difference in their worlds, there was a certain kinship between them, that they had both come to look upon the world as a pie from which any plum might be drawn if one only knew the knack.

And Sabine, on her side, not yet quite certain about casting aside all barriers, was slowly reaching the same understanding. There was no love or sentimentality in the spark that flashed between them. She was more than ten years older than O’Hara and had done with such things long ago. It was merely a recognition of one strong person by another.

It was O’Hara who first took advantage of the bond. In the midst of the conversation, he had turned the talk rather abruptly to Pentlands.

“I’ve never been there and I know very little of the life,” he said, “but I’ve watched it from a distance and it interests me. It’s like something out of a dream, completely dead ... dead all save for young Mrs. Pentland and Sybil.”

Sabine smiled. “You know Sybil, then?”

“We ride together every morning.... We met one morning by chance along the path by the river and since then we’ve gone nearly every day.”

“She’s a charming girl.... She went to school in France with my daughter, Thérèse. I saw a great deal of her then.”

Far back in her mind the thought occurred to her that there would be something very amusing in the prospect of Sybil married to O’Hara. It would produce such an uproar with Anson and Aunt Cassie and the other relatives.... A Pentland married to an Irish Roman Catholic politician!

“She is like her mother, isn’t she?” asked O’Hara, sitting forward a bit on his chair. He had a way of sitting thus, in the tense, quiet alertness of a cat.

“Very like her mother.... Her mother is a remarkable woman ... a charming woman ... also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things, a really good and generous woman.”

“I’ve thought that.... I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to help me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she had a passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse ... though she scarcely knew me. She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to know her. But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I haven’t seen her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me. Sometimes I feel sorry for her.... It must be a queer life for a woman like that ... young and beautiful.”

“She has a great deal to occupy her at Pentlands. And it’s true that it’s not a very fascinating life. Still, I’m sure she couldn’t bear being pitied.... She’s the last woman in the world to want pity.”

Curiously, O’Hara flushed, the red mounting slowly beneath the dark-tanned skin.

“I thought,” he said a little sadly, “that her husband or Mrs. Struthers might have raised objections.... I know how they feel toward me. There’s no use pretending not to know.”

“It is quite possible,” said Sabine.

There was a sudden embarrassing silence, which gave Sabine time to pull her wits together and organize a thousand sudden thoughts and impressions. She was beginning to understand, bit by bit, the real reasons of their hatred for O’Hara, the reasons which lay deep down underneath, perhaps so deep that none of them ever saw them for what they were.

And then out of the silence she heard the voice of O’Hara saying, in a queer, hushed way, “I mean to ask something of you ... something that may sound ridiculous. I don’t pretend that it isn’t, but I mean to ask it anyway.”

For a moment he hesitated and then, rising quickly, he stood looking away from her out of the door, toward the distant blue marshes and the open sea. She fancied that he was trembling a little, but she could not be certain. What she did know was that he made an immense and heroic effort, that for a moment he, a man who never did such things, placed himself in a position where he would be defenseless and open to being cruelly hurt; and for the moment all the recklessness seemed to flow out of him and in its place there came a queer sadness, almost as if he felt himself defeated in some way....

He said, “What I mean to ask you is this.... Will you ask me sometimes here to the cottage when she will be here too?” He turned toward her suddenly and added, “It will mean a great deal to me ... more than you can imagine.”

She did not answer him at once, but sat watching him with a poorly concealed intensity; and presently, flicking the cigarette ashes casually from her gown, she asked, “And do you think it would be quite moral of me?”

He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her in astonishment, as if he had expected her, least of all people in the world, to ask such a thing.

“It might,” he said, “make us both a great deal happier.”

“Perhaps ... perhaps not. It’s not so simple as that. Besides, it isn’t happiness that one places first at Pentlands.”

“No.... Still....” He made a sudden vigorous gesture, as if to sweep aside all objections.

“You’re a queer man.... I’ll see what can be done.”

He thanked her and went out shyly without another word, to stride across the meadows, his black head bent thoughtfully, in the direction of his new bright chimneys. At his heels trotted the springer, which had lain waiting for him outside the door. There was something about the robust figure, crossing the old meadow through the blue twilight, that carried a note of lonely sadness. The self-confidence, the assurance, seemed to have melted away in some mysterious fashion. It was almost as if one man had entered the cottage a little while before and another, a quite different man, had left it just now. Only one thing, Sabine saw, could have made the difference, and that was the name of Olivia.

When he had disappeared Sabine went up to her room overlooking the sea and lay there for a long time thinking. She was by nature an indolent woman, especially at times when her brain worked with a fierce activity. It was working thus now, in a kind of fever, confused and yet tremendously clear; for the visits from Aunt Cassie and O’Hara had ignited her almost morbid passion for vicarious experience. She had a sense of being on the brink of some calamity which, beginning long ago in a hopeless tangle of origins and motives, was ready now to break forth with the accumulated force of years.

It was only now that she began to understand a little what it was that had drawn her back to a place which held memories so unhappy as those haunting the whole countryside of Durham. She saw that it must have been all the while a desire for vindication, a hunger to show them that, in spite of everything, of the straight red hair and the plain face, the silly ideas with which they had filled her head, in spite even of her unhappiness over her husband, she had made of her life a successful, even a brilliant, affair. She had wanted to show them that she stood aloof now and impregnable, quite beyond their power to curb or to injure her. And for a moment she suspected that the half-discerned motive was an even stronger thing, akin perhaps to a desire for vengeance; for she held this world about Durham responsible for the ruin of her happiness. She knew now, as a worldly woman of forty-six, that if she had been brought up knowing life for what it was, she might never have lost the one man who had ever roused a genuine passion in a nature so hard and dry.

It was all confused and tormented and vague, yet the visit of Aunt Cassie, filled with implications and veiled attempts to humble her, had cleared the air enormously.

And behind the closed lids, the green eyes began to see a whole procession of calamities which lay perhaps within her power to create. She began to see how it might even be possible to bring the whole world of Pentlands down about their heads in a collapse which could create only freedom and happiness to Olivia and her daughter. And it was these two alone for whom she had any affection; the others might be damned, gloriously damned, while she stood by without raising a finger.

She began to see where the pieces of the puzzle lay, the wedges which might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world that once more surrounded her.

Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of power, of having all the tools at hand, of being the dea ex machinâ of the calamity.

She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the end even money could not save them. There came a time when a great fortune might be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.

She was still lying there when Thérèse came in—a short, plain, rather stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead. She was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired unhappy little girl had been so many times in that far-off, half-forgotten childhood.

“Where have you been?” she asked indifferently, for there was always a curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.

“Catching frogs to dissect,” said Thérèse. “They’re damned scarce and I slipped into the river.”

Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance of marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found satisfaction in the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse’s life so that no one could ever hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer nomadic life they had led together, meeting all sorts of men and women who were, in Sabine’s curious sense of the word, “complete,” the girl had pierced her way somehow to the bottom of things. She was building her young life upon a rock, so that she could afford to feel contempt for the very forces which long ago had hurt her mother. She might, like O’Hara, be suddenly humbled by love; but that, Sabine knew, was a glorious thing well worth suffering.

She knew it each time that she looked at her child and saw the clear gray eyes of the girl’s father looking out of the dark face with the same proud look of indifferent confidence which had fascinated her twenty years ago. So long as Thérèse was alive, she would never be able wholly to forget him.

“Go wash yourself,” she said. “Old Mr. Pentland and Olivia and Mrs. Soames are coming to dine and play bridge.”

As she dressed for dinner she no longer asked herself, “Why did I ever imagine Thérèse might find a husband here? What ever induced me to come back here to be bored all summer long?”

She had forgotten all that. She began to see that the summer held prospects of diversion. It might even turn into a fascinating game. She knew that her return had nothing to do with Thérèse’s future; she had been drawn back into Durham by some vague but overwhelming desire for mischief.

CHAPTER V

1

When Anson Pentland came down from the city in the evening, Olivia was always there to meet him dutifully and inquire about the day. The answers were always the same: “No, there was not much doing in town,” and, “It was very hot,” or, “I made a discovery to-day that will be of great use to me in the book.”

Then after a bath he would appear in tweeds to take his exercise in the garden, pottering about mildly and peering closely with his near-sighted blue eyes at little tags labeled “General Pershing” or “Caroline Testout” or “Poincaré” or “George Washington” which he tied carefully on the new dahlias and roses and smaller shrubs. And, more often than not, the gardener would spend half the next morning removing the tags and placing them on the proper plants, for Anson really had no interest in flowers and knew very little about them. The tagging was only a part of his passion for labeling things; it made the garden at Pentlands seem a more subdued and ordered place. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that he went through life ticketing and pigeonholing everything that came his way: manners, emotions, thoughts, everything. It was a habit that was growing on him in middle-age.

Dinner was usually late because Anson liked to take advantage of the long summer twilights, and after dinner it was the habit of all the family, save Jack, who went to bed immediately afterward, to sit in the Victorian drawing-room, reading and writing letters or sometimes playing patience, with Anson in his corner at Mr. Lowell’s desk working over “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and keeping up a prodigious correspondence with librarians and old men and women of a genealogical bent. The routine of the evening rarely changed, for Anson disliked going out and Olivia preferred not to go alone. It was only with the beginning of the summer, when Sybil was grown and had begun to go out occasionally to dinners and balls, and the disturbing Sabine, with her passion for playing bridge, had come into the neighborhood, that the routine was beginning to break up. There were fewer evenings now with Olivia and Sybil playing patience and old John Pentland sitting by the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or simply staring silently before him, lost in thought.

There were times in those long evenings when Olivia, looking up suddenly and for no reason at all, would discover that Sybil was sitting in the same fashion watching her, and both of them would know that they, like old John Pentland, had been sitting there all the while holding books in their hands without knowing a word of what they had read. It was as if a kind of enchantment descended upon them, as if they were waiting for something. Once or twice the silence had been broken sharply by the unbearable sound of groans coming from the north wing when she had been seized suddenly by one of her fits of violence.

Anson’s occasional comment and Olivia’s visits to Jack’s room to see that nothing had happened to him were the only interruptions. They spoke always in low voices when they played double patience in order not to disturb Anson at his work. Sometimes he encountered a bit of information for which he had been searching for a long time and then he would turn and tell them of it.

There was the night when he made his discovery about Savina Pentland....

“I was right about Savina Pentland,” he said. “She was a first cousin and not a second cousin of Toby Cane.”

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.

The pictures hung in a neat double row in the lofty hall, arranged chronologically and without respect for lighting, so that the good ones like those by Ingres and Sargent’s picture of old John Pentland and the unfinished Gilbert Stuart of Ashur Pentland hung in obscure shadows, and the bad ones like the tavern-sign portrait of the first Pentland were exposed in a glare of brilliant light.

This father of all the family had been painted at the great age of eighty-nine and looked out from his wooden background, a grim, hard-mouthed old fellow with white hair and shrewd eyes set very close together. It was a face such as one might find to-day among the Plymouth Brethren of some remote, half-forgotten Sussex village, the face of a man notable only for the toughness of his body and the rigidity of a mind which dissented from everything. At the age of eighty-four, he had been cast out for dissension from the church which he had come to regard as his own property.

Next to him hung the portrait of a Pentland who had been a mediocrity and left not even a shadowy legend; and then appeared the insolent, disagreeable face of the Pentland who had ducked eccentric old women for witches and cut off the ears of peace-loving Quakers in the colony founded in “freedom to worship God.”

The third Pentland had been the greatest evangelist of his time, a man who went through New England holding high the torch, exhorting rude village audiences by the coarsest of language to such a pitch of excitement that old women died of apoplexy and young women gave birth to premature children. The sermons which still existed showed him to be a man uncultivated and at times almost illiterate, yet his vast energy had founded a university and his fame as an exhorter and “the flaming sword of the Lord” had traveled to the ignorant and simple-minded brethren of the English back country.

The next Pentland was the eldest of the exhorter’s twenty children (by four wives), a man who clearly had departed from his father’s counsels and appeared in his portrait a sensual, fleshly specimen, very fat and almost good-natured, with thick red lips. It was this Pentland who had founded the fortune which gave the family its first step upward in the direction of the gentility which had ended with the figure of Anson bending over “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He had made a large fortune by equipping privateers and practising a near-piracy on British merchantmen; and there was, too, a dark rumor (which Anson intended to overlook) that he had made as much as three hundred per cent profit on a single shipload of negroes in the African slave trade.

After him there were portraits of two Pentlands who had taken part in the Revolution and then another hiatus of mediocrity, including the gap represented by the missing Jared; and then appeared the Anthony Pentland who increased the fortune enormously in the clipper trade. It was the portrait of a swarthy, powerful man (the first of the dark Pentlands, who could all be traced directly to Savina’s Portuguese blood), painted by a second-rate artist devoted to realism, who had depicted skilfully the warts which marred the distinguished old gentleman. In the picture he stood in the garden before the Pentland house at Durham with marshes in the background and his prize clipper Semiramis riding, with all sail up, the distant ocean.

Next to him appeared the portrait of old John Pentland’s father—a man of pious expression, dressed all in black, with a high black stock and a wave of luxuriant black hair, the one who had raised the family to really great wealth by contracts for shoes and blankets for the soldiers at Gettysburg and Bull Run and Richmond. After him, gentility had conquered completely, and the Sargent portrait of old John Pentland at middle-age showed a man who was master of hounds and led the life of a country gentleman, a man clearly of power and character, whose strength of feature had turned slowly into the bitter hardness of the old man who sat now in the light of Mr. Longfellow’s lamp reading or staring before him into space while his son set down the long history of the family.

The gallery was fascinating to strangers, as the visual record of a family which had never lost any money (save for the extravagance of Savina Pentland’s jewels), a family which had been the backbone of a community, a family in which the men married wives for thrift and housewifely virtues rather than for beauty, a family solid and respectable and full of honor. It was a tribe magnificent in its virtue and its strength, even at times in its intolerance and hypocrisy. It stood represented now by old John Pentland and Anson, and the boy who lay abovestairs in the room next Olivia’s, dying slowly.

At ten o’clock each night John Pentland bade them good-night and went off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and placing his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia, “I wouldn’t sit up too late, if I were you, when you are so tired,” left them and disappeared. Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and climbed the stairs past all the ancestors.

It was only then, after they had all left her, that a kind of peace settled over Olivia. The burdens lifted, and the cares, the worries, the thoughts that were always troubling her, faded into the distance and for a time she sat leaning back in the winged armchair with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the night—the faint murmur of the breeze in the faded lilacs outside the window, the creaking that afflicts very old houses in the night, and sometimes the ominous sound of Miss Egan’s step traversing distantly the old north wing. And then one night she heard again the distant sound of Higgins’ voice swearing at the red mare as he made his round of the stables before going to bed.

And after they had all gone she opened her book and fell to reading, “Madame de Clèves ne répondit rien, et elle pensoit avec honte qu’elle auroit pris tout ce que l’on disoit du changement de ce prince pour des marques de sa passion, si elle n’avoit point été détrompée. Elle se sentoit quelque aigreur contre Madame la Dauphine....” This was a world in which she felt somehow strangely at peace, as if she had once lived in it and returned in the silence of the night.

At midnight she closed the book, and making a round of the lower rooms, put out the lights and went up to the long stairway to listen at the doorway of her son’s room for the weak, uncertain sound of his breathing.

2

Olivia was right in her belief that Anson was ashamed of his behavior on the night of the ball. It was not that he made an apology or even mentioned the affair. He simply never spoke of it again. For weeks after the scene he did not mention the name of O’Hara, perhaps because the name brought up inevitably the memory of his sudden, insulting speech; but his sense of shame prevented him from harassing her on the subject. What he never knew was that Olivia, while hating him for the insult aimed at her father, was also pleased in a perverse, feminine way because he had displayed for a moment a sudden fit of genuine anger. For a moment he had come very near to being a husband who might interest his wife.

But in the end he only sank back again into a sea of indifference so profound that even Aunt Cassie’s campaign of insinuations and veiled proposals could not stir him into action. The old woman managed to see him alone once or twice, saying to him, “Anson, your father is growing old and can’t manage everything much longer. You must begin to take a stand yourself. The family can’t rest on the shoulders of a woman. Besides, Olivia is an outsider, really. She’s never understood our world.” And then, shaking her head sadly, she would murmur, “There’ll be trouble, Anson, when your father dies, if you don’t show some backbone. You’ll have trouble with Sybil, she’s very queer and pig-headed in her quiet way, just as Olivia was in the matter of sending her to school in Paris.”

And after a pause, “I am the last person in the world to interfere; it’s only for your own good and Olivia’s and all the family’s.”

And Anson, to be rid of her, would make promises, facing her with averted eyes in some corner of the garden or the old house where she had skilfully run him to earth beyond the possibility of escape. And he would leave her, troubled and disturbed because the world and this family which had been saddled unwillingly upon him, would permit him no peace to go on with his writing. He really hated Aunt Cassie because she had never given him any peace, never since the days when she had kept him in the velvet trousers and Fauntleroy curls which spurred the jeers of the plain, red-haired little Sabine. She had never ceased to reproach him for “not being a man and standing up for his rights.” It seemed to him that Aunt Cassie was always hovering near, like a dark persistent fury, always harassing him; and yet he knew, more by instinct than by any process of reasoning, that she was his ally against the others, even his own wife and father and children. He and Aunt Cassie prayed to the same gods.

So he did nothing, and Olivia, keeping her word, spoke of O’Hara to Sybil one day as they sat alone at breakfast.

The girl had been riding with him that very morning and she sat in her riding-clothes, her face flushed by the early morning exercise, telling her mother of the beauties of the country back of Durham, of the new beagle puppies, and of the death of “Hardhead” Smith, who was the last farmer of old New England blood in the county. His half-witted son, she said, was being taken away to an asylum. O’Hara, she said, was buying his little stony patch of ground.

When she had finished, her mother said, “And O’Hara? You like him, don’t you?”

Sybil had a way of looking piercingly at a person, as if her violet eyes tried to bore quite through all pretense and unveil the truth. She had a power of honesty and simplicity that was completely disarming, and she used it now, smiling at her mother, candidly.

“Yes, I like him very much.... But ... but....” She laughed softly. “Are you worrying about my marrying him, my falling in love—because you needn’t. I am fond of him because he’s the one person around here who likes the things I like. He loves riding in the early morning when the dew is still on the grass and he likes racing with me across the lower meadow by the gravel-pit, and well—he’s an interesting man. When he talks, he makes sense. But don’t worry; I shan’t marry him.”

“I was interested,” said Olivia, “because you do see him more than any one about here.”

Again Sybil laughed. “But he’s old, Mama. He’s more than thirty-five. He’s middle-aged. I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly. He’s going to be my own age.”

“One can’t always tell. It’s not so easy as that.”

“I’m sure I can tell.” Her face took on an expression of gravity. “I’ve devoted a good deal of thought to it and I’ve watched a great many others.”

Olivia wanted to smile, but she knew she dared not if she were to keep her hold upon confidences so charming and naïve.

“And I’m sure that I’ll know the man when I see him, right away, at once. It’ll be like a spark, like my friendship with O’Hara, only deeper than that.”

“Did you ever talk to Thérèse about love?” asked Olivia.

“No; you can’t talk to her about such things. She wouldn’t understand. With Thérèse everything is scientific, biological. When Thérèse marries, I think it will be some man she has picked out as the proper father, scientifically, for her children.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

“She might just have children by him without marrying him, the way she breeds frogs. I think that’s horrible.”

Again Olivia was seized with an irresistible impulse to laugh, and controlled herself heroically. She kept thinking of how silly, how ignorant, she had been at Sybil’s age, silly and ignorant despite the unclean sort of sophistication she had picked up in the corridors of Continental hotels. She kept thinking how much better a chance Sybil had for happiness.... Sybil, sitting there gravely, defending her warm ideas of romance against the scientific onslaughts of the swarthy, passionate Thérèse.

“It will be some one like O’Hara,” continued Sybil. “Some one who is very much alive—only not middle-aged like O’Hara.”

(So Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged, and he was four years younger than Olivia, who felt and looked so young. The girl kept talking of O’Hara as if his life were over; but that perhaps was only because she herself was so young.)

Olivia sighed now, despite herself. “You mustn’t expect too much from the world, Sybil. Nothing is perfect, not even marriage. One always has to make compromises.”

“Oh, I know that; I’ve thought a great deal about it. All the same, I’m sure I’ll know the man when I see him.” She leaned forward and said earnestly, “Couldn’t you tell when you were a girl?”

“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “I could tell.”

And then, inevitably, Sybil asked what Olivia kept praying she would not ask. She could hear the girl asking it before the words were spoken. She knew exactly what she would say.

“Didn’t you know at once when you met Father?”

And in spite of every effort, the faint echo of a sigh escaped Olivia. “Yes, I knew.”

She saw Sybil give her one of those quick, piercing looks of inquiry and then bow her head abruptly, as if pretending to study the pattern on her plate.

When she spoke again, she changed the subject abruptly, so that Olivia knew she suspected the truth, a thing which she had guarded with a fierce secrecy for so long.

“Why don’t you take up riding again, Mother?” she asked. “I’d love to have you go with me. We would go with O’Hara in the mornings, and then Aunt Cassie couldn’t have anything to say about my getting involved with him.” She looked up. “You’d like him. You couldn’t help it.”

She saw that Sybil was trying to help her in some way, to divert her and drive away the unhappiness.

“I like him already,” said Olivia, “very much.”

Then she rose, saying, “I promised Sabine to motor into Boston with her to-day. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”

She went quickly away because she knew it was perilous to sit there any longer talking of such things while Sybil watched her, eager with the freshness of youth which has all life before it.

Out of all their talk two things remained distinct in her mind: one that Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged—almost an old man, for whom there was no longer any chance of romance; the other the immense possibility for tragedy that lay before a girl who was so certain that love would be a glorious romantic affair, so certain of the ideal man whom she would find one day. What was she to do with Sybil? Where was she to find that man? And when she found him, what difficulties would she have to face with John Pentland and Anson and Aunt Cassie and the host of cousins and connections who would be marshaled to defeat her?

For she saw clearly enough that this youth for whom Sybil was waiting would never be their idea of a proper match. It would be a man with qualities which O’Hara possessed, and even Higgins, the groom. She saw perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders; she had come to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked, and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat. They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings. O’Hara, with his career and his energy, and Higgins, with his rabbitlike love-affairs and his nearness to all that was earthy, still carried about them a sense of the great zest in life. They reached down somehow into the roots of things where there was still savor and fertility.

And as she walked along the hallway, she found herself laughing aloud over the titles of the only three books which the Pentland family had ever produced—“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” and Mr. Struthers’ two books, “Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards.” She thought suddenly of what Sabine had once said acidly of New England—that it was a place where thoughts were likely to grow “higher and fewer.”

But she was frightened, too, because in the life of enchantment which surrounded her, the virtues of O’Hara and Higgins seemed to her the only things in the world worth possessing. She wanted desperately to be alive, as she had never been, and she knew that this, too, was what Sybil sought in all her groping, half-blind romantic youth. It was something which the girl sensed and had never clearly understood, something which she knew existed and was awaiting her.

3

Sabine, watching O’Hara as he crossed the fields through the twilight, had penetrated in a sudden flash of intuition the depths of his character. His profound loneliness was, perhaps, the key which unlocked the whole of his soul, a key which Sabine knew well enough, for there had never been a time in all her existence, save for a sudden passionate moment or two in the course of her life with Callendar, when she was free of a painful feeling that she was alone. Even with her own daughter, the odd Thérèse, she was lonely. Watching life with the same passionate intensity with which she had watched the distant figure of O’Hara moving away against the horizon, she had come long ago to understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity. Looking about her she saw that old John Pentland was lonely, and Olivia, and even her own daughter Thérèse, rambling off independently across the marshes in search of bugs and queer plants. She saw that Anson Pentland was never lonely, for he had his friends who were so like him as to be very nearly indistinguishable, and he had all the traditions and fetishes which he shared with Aunt Cassie. They were part of a fabric, a small corner in the whole tapestry of life, from which they were inseparable.

Of them all, it seemed to her, as she came to see more and more of O’Hara, that he was the most lonely. He had friends, scores, even hundreds of them, in a dozen circles, ranging from the docks where he had spent his boyhood to the world about Durham where there were others who treated him less coldly than the Pentland family had done. He had friends because there was a quality about him which was irresistible. It lurked somewhere in the depths of the humorous blue eyes and at the corners of the full, rather sensual mouth—a kind of universal sympathy which made him understand the fears, the hopes, the ambitions, the weaknesses of other people. It was that quality, so invaluable in politics, which led enemies unjustly to call him all things to all people. He must have had the gift of friendship, for there were whole sections of Boston which would have followed him anywhere; and yet behind these easy, warm ties there was always a sort of veil shutting him away from them. He had a way of being at home in a barroom or at a hunt breakfast with equal ease, but there was a part of him—the part which was really O’Hara—which the world never saw at all, a strangely warm, romantic, impractical, passionate, headlong, rather unscrupulous Irishman, who lay shut away where none could penetrate. Sabine knew this O’Hara; he had been revealed to her swiftly in a sudden flash at the mention of Olivia Pentland. And afterward when she thought of it, she (Sabine Callendar), who was so hard, so bitter, so unbelieving, surrendered to him as so many had done before her.

Standing there in her sitting-room, so big and powerful and self-reliant, he had seemed suddenly like a little boy, like the little boy whom she had found once late at night long ago, sitting alone and quite still on the curb in front of her house in the Rue de Tilsitt. She had stopped for a moment and watched him, and presently she had approached and asked, “What are you doing here on the curb at this hour of the night?” And the little boy, looking up, had said gravely, “I’m playing.”

It had happened years ago—the little boy must have grown into a young man by now—but she remembered him suddenly during the moment when O’Hara had turned and said to her, “It will mean a great deal to me, more than you can imagine.”

O’Hara was like that, she knew—sad and a little lonely, as if in the midst of all his success, with his career and his big new house and his dogs and horses and all the other shiny accoutrements of a gentleman, he had looked up at her and said gravely, “I’m playing.”

Long ago Sabine had come to understand that one got a savor out of life by casting overboard all the little rules which clutter up existence, all the ties, and beliefs and traditions in which she had been given a training so intense and severe that in the end she had turned a rebel. Behind all the indifference of countenance and the intricacy of brain, there lay a foundation of immense candor which had driven her to seek her companions, with the directness of an arrow, only among the persons whom she had come to designate as “complete.” It was a label which she did not trouble to define to any one, doubting perhaps that any one save herself would find any interest in it; even for herself, it was a label lacking in definiteness. Vaguely she meant by “complete” the persons who stood on their own, who had an existence sufficiently strong to survive the assault or the collapse of any environment, persons who might exist independent of any concrete world, who possessed a proud sense of individuality, who might take root and work out a successful destiny wherever fate chanced to drop them. They were rare, she had come to discover, and yet they existed everywhere, such persons as John Pentland and O’Hara, Olivia and Higgins.

So she had come to seek her life among them, drawing them quietly about her wherever in the world she happened to pause for a time. She did it quietly and without loud cries of “Freedom” and “Free Love” and “The Right to Lead One’s Life,” for she was enough civilized to understand the absurdity of making a spectacle in the market-place, and she was too intense an individualist ever to turn missionary. Here perhaps lay her quiet strength and the source of that vague distrust and uneasiness which her presence created in people like Anson and Aunt Cassie. It was unbearable for Aunt Cassie to suspect that Sabine really did not trouble even to scorn her, unbearable to an old woman who had spent all her life in arranging the lives of others to find that a chit of a woman like Sabine could discover in her only a subject of mingled mirth and pity. It was unbearable not to have the power of jolting Sabine out of her serene and insolent indifference, unbearable to know that she was always watching you out of those green eyes, turning you over and over as if you were a bug and finding you in the end an inferior sort of insect. Those who had shared the discovery of her secret were fond of her, and those who had not were bitter against her. And it was, after all, a very simple secret, that one has only to be simple and friendly and human and “complete.” She had no patience with sentimentality, and affectation and false piety.

And so the presence of Sabine began slowly to create a vaguely defined rift in a world hitherto set and complacent and even proud of itself. Something in the sight of her cold green eyes, in the sound of her metallic voice, in the sudden shrewd, disillusioning observations which she had a way of making at disconcerting moments, filled people like Aunt Cassie with uneasiness and people like Olivia with a smoldering sense of restlessness and rebellion. Olivia herself became more and more conscious of the difference with the passing of each day into the next and there were times when she suspected that that fierce old man, her father-in-law, was aware of it. It was potent because Sabine was no outsider; the mockery of an outsider would have slipped off the back of the Durham world like arrows off the back of an armadillo. But Sabine was one of them: it was that which made the difference: she was always inside the shell.

4

One hot, breathless night in June Sabine overcame her sense of bored indolence enough to give a dinner at Brook Cottage—a dinner well served, with delicious food, which it might have been said she flung at her guests with a superb air of indifference from the seat at the head of the table, where she sat painted, ugly and magnificently dressed, watching them all in a perverse sort of pleasure. It was a failure as an entertainment, for it had been years since Sabine had given a dinner where the guests were not clever enough to entertain themselves, and now that she was back again in a world where people were invited for every sort of reason save that you really wanted their company, she declined to make any effort. It was a failure, too, because Thérèse, for whom it was given, behaved exactly as she had behaved on the night of the ball. There was an uneasiness and a strain, a sense of awkwardness among the callow young men and a sense of weariness in Sabine and Olivia. O’Hara was there, for Sabine had kept her half-promise; but even he sat quietly, all his boldness and dash vanished before a boyish shyness. The whole affair seemed to be drowned in the lassitude, the enchantment that enveloped the old house on the other bank of the river.

Olivia had come, almost against her will, reduced to a state of exhaustion after a long call from Aunt Cassie on the subject of the rumored affair between Sybil and their Irish neighbor. And when they rose, she slipped quietly away into the garden, because she could not bear the thought of making strained and artificial conversation. She wanted, horribly, to be left in peace.

It was a superb night—hot, as a summer night should be—but clear, too, so that the whole sky was like a sapphire dome studded with diamonds. At the front of the cottage, beyond the borders of the little terraced garden, the marshes spread their dark carpet toward the distant dunes, which with the descent of darkness had turned dim and blue against the purer white of the line made by the foaming surf. The feel of the damp thick grass against the sole of her silver slippers led her to stop for a moment, breathing deeply, and filled her with a mild, half-mystical desire to blend herself into all the beauty that surrounded her, into the hot richness of the air, the scents of the opening blossoms and of pushing green stems, into the grass and the sea and the rich-smelling marshes, to slip away into a state which was nothing and yet everything, to float into eternity. She had abruptly an odd, confused sense of the timelessness of all these forces and sensations, of the sea and the marshes, the pushing green Stems and the sapphire dome powdered with diamonds above her head. She saw for the first time in all her existence the power of something which went on and on, ignoring pitiful small creatures like herself and all those others in the cottage behind her, a power which ignored cities and armies and nations, which would go on and on long after the grass had blanketed the ruins of the old house at Pentland. It was sweeping past her, leaving her stranded somewhere in the dull backwaters. She wanted suddenly, fiercely, to take part in all the great spectacle of eternal fertility, a mystery which was stronger than any of them or all of them together, a force which in the end would crush all their transient little prides and beliefs and traditions.

And then she thought, as if she were conscious of it for the first time, “I am tired, tired to death, and a little mad.”

Moving across the damp grass she seated herself on a stone bench which O’Hara had placed beneath one of the ancient apple-trees left standing from the orchard which had covered all the land about Brook Cottage in the days when Savina Pentland was still alive; and for a long time (she never knew how long) she remained there lost in one of those strange lapses of consciousness when one is neither awake nor asleep but in the vague borderland where there is no thought, no care, no troubles. And then slowly she became aware of some one standing there quite near her, beneath the ancient, gnarled tree. As if the presence were materialized somehow out of a dream, she noticed first the faint, insinuating masculine odor of cigar-smoke blending itself with the scent of the growing flowers in Sabine’s garden, and then turning she saw a black figure which she recognized at once as that of O’Hara. There was no surprise in the sight of him; it seemed in a queer way as if she had been expecting him.

As she turned, he moved toward her and spoke. “Our garden has flourished, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You’d never think it was only a year old.”

“Yes,” she said. “It has flourished marvelously.” And then, after a little pause, “How long have you been standing there?”

“Only a moment. I saw you come out of the house.” They listened for a time to the distant melancholy pounding of the surf, and presently he said softly, with a kind of awe in his voice: “It is a marvelous night ... a night full of splendor.”

She made an effort to answer him, but somehow she could think of nothing to say. The remark, uttered so quietly, astonished her, because she had never thought of O’Hara as one who would be sensitive to the beauty of a night. It was too dark to distinguish his face, but she kept seeing him as she remembered him, seeing him, too, as the others thought of him—rough and vigorous but a little common, with the scar on his temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: “It is a night full of splendor.” The men she knew—Anson’s friends—never said such things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done anything so unusual.

“The party is not a great success,” he was saying.

“No.”

“No one seems to be getting on with any one else. Mrs. Callendar ought not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that.”

Olivia laughed softly. “She may have done it on purpose. You can never tell why she does anything.”

For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he said, “You aren’t cold out here?”

“No, not on a night like this.”

There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.

“I keep wondering,” she said, “how long it will be until the bungalows of Durham creep down and cover all this land.”

“They won’t, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea.”

In the darkness she smiled at the thought of an Irish Roman Catholic politician as the protector of this old New England countryside, and aloud she said, “You’re growing to be like all the others. You want to make the world stand still.”

“Yes, I can see that it must seem funny to you.” There was no bitterness in his voice, but only a sort of hurt, which again astonished her, because it was impassible to think of O’Hara as one who could be hurt.

“There will always be the Pentland house, but, of course, all of us will die some day and then what?”

“There will always be our children.”

She was aware slowly of slipping back into that world of cares and troubles behind her from which she had escaped a little while before. She said, “You are looking a long way into the future.”

“Perhaps, but I mean to have children one day. And at Pentlands there is always Sybil, who will fight for it fiercely. She’ll never give it up.”

“But it’s Jack who will own it, and I’m not so sure about him.”

Unconsciously she sighed, knowing now that she was pretending again, being dishonest. She was pretending again that Jack would live to have Pentlands for his own, that he would one day have children who would carry it on. She kept saying to herself, “It is only the truth that can save us all.” And she knew that O’Hara understood her feeble game of pretending. She knew because he stood there silently, as if Jack were already dead, as if he understood the reason for the faint bitter sigh and respected it.

“You see a great deal of Sybil, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, she is a good girl. One can depend on her.”

“Perhaps if she had a little of Thérèse or Mrs. Callendar in her, she’d be safer from being hurt.”

He did not answer her at once, but she knew that in the darkness he was standing there, watching her.

“But that was a silly thing to say,” she murmured. “I don’t suppose you know what I mean.”

He answered her quickly. “I do know exactly. I know and I’m sure Mrs. Callendar knows. We’ve both learned to save ourselves—not in the same school, but the same lesson, nevertheless. But as to Sybil, I think that depends upon whom she marries.”

(“So now,” thought Olivia, “it is coming. It is Sybil whom he loves. He wants to marry her. That is why he has followed me out here.”) She was back again now, solidly enmeshed in all the intricacies of living. She had a sudden, shameful, twinge of jealousy for Sybil, who was so young, who had pushed her so completely into the past along with all the others at Pentlands.

“I was wondering,” she said, “whether she was not seeing too much of you, whether she might not be a bother.”

“No, she’ll never be that.” And then in a voice which carried a faint echo of humor, he added, “I know that in a moment you are going to ask my intentions.”

“No,” she said, “no”; but she could think of nothing else to say. She felt suddenly shy and awkward and a little idiotic, like a young girl at her first dance.

“I shall tell you what my intentions are,” he was saying, and then he broke off suddenly. “Why is it so impossible to be honest in this world, when we live such a little while? It would be such a different place if we were all honest wouldn’t it?”

He hesitated, waiting for her to answer, and she said, “Yes,” almost mechanically, “very different.”

When he replied there was a faint note of excitement in his voice. It was pitched a little lower and he spoke more quickly. In the darkness she could not see him, and yet she was sharply conscious of the change.

“I’ll tell you, then,” he was saying, “I’ve been seeing a great deal of Sybil in the hope that I should see a little of her mother.”

She did not answer him. She simply sat there, speechless, overcome by confusion, as if she had been a young girl with her first lover. She was even made a little dizzy by the sound of his voice.

“I have offended you. I’m sorry. I only spoke the truth. There is no harm in that.”

With a heroic effort to speak intelligently, she succeeded in saying, “No, I am not offended.” (It all seemed such a silly, helpless, pleasant feeling.) “No, I’m not offended. I don’t know....”

Of only one thing was she certain; that this strange, dizzy, intoxicated state was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was sinister and overwhelming in a bitter-sweet fashion. She kept thinking, “I can begin to understand how a young girl can be seduced, how she cannot know what she is doing.”

“I suppose,” he was saying, “that you think me presumptuous.”

“No, I only think everything is impossible, insane.”

“You think me a kind of ruffian, a bum, an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, some one you have never heard of.” He waited, and then added: “I am all that, from one point of view.”

“No, I don’t think that; I don’t think that.”

He sat down beside her quietly on the stone bench. “You have every right to think it,” he continued softly. “Every right in the world, and still things like that make no difference, nothing makes any difference.”

“My father,” she said softly, “was a man very like you. His enemies sometimes used to call him ‘shanty Irish.’...”

She knew all the while that she should have risen and sought indignant refuge in the house. She knew that perhaps she was being absurd, and yet she stayed there quietly. She was so tired and she had waited for so long (she only knew it now in a sudden flash) to have some one talk to her in just this way, as if she were a woman. She needed some one to lean upon, so desperately.

“How can you know me?” she asked out of a vague sense of helplessness. “How can you know anything about me?”

He did not touch her. He only sat there in the darkness, making her feel by a sort of power which was too strong for her, that all he said was terribly the truth.

“I know, I know, all about you, everything. I’ve watched you. I’ve understood you, even better than the others. A man whose life has been like mine sees and understands a great deal that others never notice because for him everything depends upon a kind of second sight. It’s the one great weapon of the opportunist.” There was a silence and he asked, “Can you understand that? It may be hard, because your life has been so different.”

“Not so different, as you might think, only perhaps I’ve made more of a mess of it.” And straightening her body, she murmured, “It is foolish of me to let you talk this way.”

He interrupted her with a quick burst of almost boyish eagerness. “But you’re glad, aren’t you? You’re glad, all the same, whether you care anything for me or not. You’ve deserved it for a long time.”

She began to cry softly, helplessly, without a sound, the tears running down her cheeks, and she thought, “Now I’m being a supreme fool. I’m pitying myself.” But she could not stop.

It appeared that even in the darkness he was aware of her tears, for he chose not to interrupt them. They sat thus for a long time in silence, Olivia conscious with a terrible aching acuteness, of the beauty of the night and finding it all strange and unreal and confused.

“I wanted you to know,” he said quietly, “that there was some one near you, some one who worships you, who would give up everything for you.” And after a time, “Perhaps we had better go in now. You can go in through the piazza and powder your nose. I’ll go in through the door from the garden.”

And as they walked across the damp, scented grass, he said, “It would be pleasant if you would join Sybil and me riding in the morning.”

“But I haven’t been on a horse in years,” said Olivia.

Throughout the rest of the evening, while she sat playing bridge with Sabine and O’Hara and the Mannering boy, her mind kept straying from the game into unaccustomed by-ways. It was not, she told herself, that she was even remotely in love with O’Hara; it was only that some one—a man who was no creature of ordinary attractions—had confessed his admiration for her, and so she felt young and giddy and elated. The whole affair was silly ... and yet, yet, in a strange way, it was not silly at all. She kept thinking of Anson’s remarks about his father and old Mrs. Soames, “It’s a silly affair”—and of Sybil saying gravely, “Only not middle-aged, like O’Hara,” and it occurred to her at the same time that in all her life she felt really young for the first time. She had been young as she sat on the stone bench under the ancient apple-tree, young in spite of everything.

And aloud she would say, “Four spades,” and know at once that she should have made no such bid.

She was unnerved, too, by the knowledge that there were, all the while, two pairs of eyes far more absorbed in her than in the game of bridge—the green ones of Sabine and the bright blue ones of O’Hara. She could not look up without encountering the gaze of one or the other; and to protect herself she faced them with a hard, banal little smile which she put in place in the mechanical way used by Miss Egan. It was the sort of smile which made her face feel very tired, and for the first time she had a half-comic flash of pity for Miss Egan. The face of the nurse must at times have grown horribly tired.

The giddiness still clung to her as she climbed into the motor beside Sybil and they drove off down the lane which led from Brook Cottage to Pentlands. The road was a part of a whole tracery of lanes, bordered by hedges and old trees, which bound together the houses of the countryside, and at night they served as a promenade and meeting-place for the servants of the same big houses. One came upon them in little groups of three or four, standing by gates or stone walls, gossiping and giggling together in the darkness, exchanging tales of the life that passed in the houses of their masters, stories of what the old man did yesterday, and how Mrs. So-and-so only took one bath a week. There was a whole world which lay beneath the solid, smooth, monotonous surface that shielded the life of the wealthy, a world which in its way was full of mockery and dark secrets and petty gossip, a world perhaps fuller of truth because it lay hidden away where none—save perhaps Aunt Cassie, who knew how many fascinating secrets servants had—ever looked, and where there was small need for the sort of pretense which Olivia found so tragic. It circulated the dark lanes at night after the dinners of the neighborhood were finished, and sometimes the noisy echoes of its irreverent mockery rose in wild Irish laughter that echoed back and forth across the mist-hung meadows.

The same lanes were frequented, too, by lovers, who went in pairs instead of groups of three or four, and at times there were echoes of a different sort of merriment—the wild, half-hysterical laughter of some kitchen-maid being wooed roughly and passionately in some dark corner by a groom or a house-servant. It was a world which blossomed forth only at nightfall. Sometimes in the darkness the masters, motoring home from a ball or a dinner, would come upon an amorous couple, bathed in the sudden brilliant glare of motor-lights, sitting with their arms about each other against a tree, or lying half-hidden among a tangle of hawthorn and elder-bushes.

To-night, as Olivia and Sybil drove in silence along the road, the hot air was filled with the thick scent of the hawthorn-blossoms and the rich, dark odor of cattle, blown toward them across the meadows by the faint salt breeze from the marshes. It was late and the lights of the motor encountered no strayed lovers until at the foot of the hill by the old bridge the glare illuminated suddenly the figures of a man and a woman seated together against the stone wall. At their approach the woman slipped quickly over the wall, and the man, following, leaped lightly as a goat to the top and into the field beyond. Sybil laughed and murmured, “It’s Higgins again.”

It was Higgins. There was no mistaking the stocky, agile figure clad in riding-breeches and sleeveless cotton shirt, and as he leaped the wall the sight of him aroused in Olivia a nebulous, fleeting impression that was like a half-forgotten memory. A startled fawn, she thought, must have scuttled off into the bushes in the same fashion. And she had suddenly that same strange, prickly feeling of terror that had affected Sabine on the night she discovered him hidden in the lilacs watching the ball.

She shivered, and Sybil asked, “You’re not cold?”

“No.”

She was thinking of Higgins and hoping that this was not the beginning of some new scrape. Once before a girl had come to her in trouble—a Polish girl, whom she helped and sent away because she could not see that forcing Higgins to marry her would have brought anything but misery for both of them. It never ceased to amaze her that a man so gnarled and ugly, such a savage, hairy little man as Higgins, should have half the girls of the countryside running after him.

In her own room she listened in the darkness until she heard the sound of Jack’s gentle breathing and then, after undressing, she sat for a long time at the window looking out across the meadows toward the marshes. There was a subdued excitement which seemed to run through all her body and would not let her sleep. She no longer felt the weariness of spirit which had let her slip during these last few months into a kind of lethargy. She was alive, more alive than she had ever been, even as a young girl; her cheeks were hot and flushed, so that she placed her white hands against them to feel a coolness that was missing from the night air; but they, too, were hot with life.

And as she sat there, the sounds from Sybil’s room across the hall died away and at last the night grew still save for the sound of her son’s slow breathing and the familiar ghostly creakings of the old house. She was alone now, the only one who was not sleeping; and sitting above the mist-hung meadows she grew more quiet. The warm rich scents of the night drifted in at the window, and again she became aware of a kind of voluptuousness which she had sensed in the air as she sat, hours earlier, on Sabine’s terrace above the sea. It had assailed her again as they drove through the lane across the low, marshy pastures by the river. And then in the figure of Higgins, leaping the wall like a goat, it had come with a shock to a sudden climax of feeling, with a sudden acuteness which even terrified her. It still persisted a little, the odd feeling of some tremendous, powerful force at work all about her, moving swiftly and quietly, thrusting aside and annihilating those who opposed it.

She thought again, “I am a little mad to-night. What has come over me?” And she grew frightened, though it was a different sort of terror from that which afflicted her at the odd moments when she felt all about her the presence of the dead who lived on and on at Pentlands. What she knew now was no terror of the dead; it was rather a terror of warm, passionate life. She thought, “This is what must have happened to the others. This is how they must have felt before they died.”

It was not physical death that she meant, but a death somehow of the soul, a death which left behind it such withered people as Aunt Cassie and Anson, the old woman in the north wing, and even a man so rugged and powerful as John Pentland, who had struggled so much more fiercely than the others. And she got a sudden sense of being caught between two dark, struggling forces in fierce combat. It was confused and vague, yet it made her feel suddenly ill in a physical sense. The warm feeling of life and excitement flowed away, leaving her chilled and relaxed, weary all at once, and filled with a soft lassitude, still looking out into the night, still smelling the thick odor of cattle and hawthorn-blossoms.

She never knew whether or not she had fallen asleep in the bergère by the window, but she did know that she was roused abruptly by the sound of footsteps. Outside the door of her room, in the long hallway, there was some one walking, gently, cautiously. It was not this time merely the creaking of the old house; it was the sound of footfalls, regular, measured, inevitable, those of some person of almost no weight at all. She listened, and slowly, cautiously, almost as if the person were blind and groping his way in the darkness, the step advanced until presently it came opposite her and thin slivers of light outlined the door that led into the hall. Quietly she rose and, still lost in a vague sense of moving in a nightmare, she went over to the door and opened it. Far down the long hall, at the door which opened into the stairway leading to the attic of the house, there was a small circle of light cast by an electric torch. It threw into a black silhouette the figure of an old woman with white hair whom Olivia recognized at once. It was the old woman escaped from the north wing. While she stood watching her, the figure, fumbling at the door, opened it and disappeared quickly into the stairway.

There was no time to be lost, not time even to go in search of the starched Miss Egan. The poor creature might fling herself from the upper windows. So, without stopping even to throw a dressing-gown about her, Olivia went quickly along the dark hall and up the stairway where the fantastic creature in the flowered wrapper had vanished.

The attic was an enormous, unfinished room that covered the whole of the house, a vast cavern of a place, empty save for a few old trunks and pieces of broken furniture. The flotsam and jetsam of Pentland life had been stowed away there, lost and forgotten in the depths of the big room, for more than a century. No one entered it. Since Sybil and Jack had grown, it remained half-forgotten. They had played there on rainy days as small children, and before them Sabine and Anson had played in the same dark, mysterious corners among broken old trunks and sofas and chairs.

Olivia found the place in darkness save for the patches of blue light where the luminous night came in at the double row of dormer windows, and at the far end, by a group of old trunks, the circle of light from the torch that moved this way and that, as if old Mrs. Pentland were searching for something. In the haste of her escape and flight, her thin white hair had come undone and fell about her shoulders. A sickly smell of medicine hung about her.

Olivia touched her gently and said, “What have you lost, Mrs. Pentland? Can I help you?”

The old woman turned and, throwing the light of the torch full into Olivia’s face, stared at her with the round blue eyes, murmuring, “Oh, it’s you, Olivia. Then it’s all right. Perhaps you can help me.”

“What was it you lost? We might look for it in the morning.”

“I’ve forgotten what it was now. You startled me, and you know my poor brain isn’t very good, at best. It never has been since I married.” Sharply she looked at Olivia. “It didn’t affect you that way, did it? You don’t ever drift away and feel yourself growing dimmer and dimmer, do you? It’s odd. Perhaps it’s different with your husband.”

Olivia saw that the old woman was having one of those isolated moments of clarity and reason which were more horrible than her insanity because for a time she made you see that, after all, she was like yourself, human and capable of thought. To Olivia these moments were almost as if she witnessed the rising of the dead.

“No,” said Olivia. “Perhaps if we went to bed now, you’d remember in the morning.”

Old Mrs. Pentland shook her head violently. “No, no, I must find them now. It may be all different in the morning and I won’t know anything and that Irish woman won’t let me out. Say over the names of a few things like prunes, prisms, persimmons. That’s what Mr. Dickens used to have his children do when he couldn’t think of a word.”

“Let me have the light,” said Olivia; “perhaps I can find what it is you want.”

With the meekness of a child, the old woman gave her the electric torch and Olivia, turning it this way and that, among the trunks and old rubbish, made a mock search among the doll-houses and the toy dishes left scattered in the corner of the attic where the children had played house for the last time.

While she searched, the old woman kept up a running comment, half to herself: “It’s something I wanted to find very much. It’ll make a great difference here in the lives of all of us. I thought I might find Sabine here to help me. She was here yesterday morning, playing with Anson. It rained all day and they couldn’t go out. I hid it here yesterday when I came up to see them.”

Olivia again attempted wheedling.

“It’s late now, Mrs. Pentland. We ought both to be in bed. You try to remember what it is you want, and in the morning I’ll come up and find it for you.”

For a moment the old woman considered this, and at last she said, “You wouldn’t give it to me if you found it. I’m sure you wouldn’t. You’re too afraid of them all.”

“I promise you I will. You can trust me, can’t you?”

“Yes, yes, you’re the only one who doesn’t treat me as if I wasn’t quite bright. Yes, I think I can trust you.” Another thought occurred to her abruptly. “But I wouldn’t remember again. I might forget. Besides, I don’t think Miss Egan would let me.”

Olivia took one of the thin old hands in hers and said, as if she were talking to a little child, “I know what we’ll do. To-morrow you write it out on a bit of paper and then I’ll find it and bring it to you.”

“I’m sure little Sabine could find it,” said the old woman. “She’s very good at such things. She’s such a clever child.”

“I’ll go over and fetch Sabine to have her help me.”

The old woman looked at her sharply. “You’ll promise that?” she asked. “You’ll promise?”

“Of course, surely.”

“Because all the others are always deceiving me.”

And then quite gently she allowed herself to be led across the moonlit patches of the dusty floor, down the stairs and back to her room. In the hall of the north wing they came suddenly upon the starched Miss Egan, all her starch rather melted and subdued now, her red face purple with alarm.

“I’ve been looking for her everywhere, Mrs. Pentland,” she told Olivia. “I don’t know how she escaped. She was asleep when I left. I went down to the kitchen for her orange-juice, and while I was gone she disappeared.”

It was the old woman who answered. Looking gravely at Olivia, she said, with an air of confidence, “You know I never speak to her at all. She’s common. She’s a common Irish servant. They can shut me up with her, but they can’t make me speak to her.” And then she began to drift back again into the hopeless state that was so much more familiar. She began to mumble over and over again a chain of words and names which had no coherence.

Olivia and Miss Egan ignored her, as if part of her—the vaguely rational old woman—had disappeared, leaving in her place this pitiful chattering creature who was a stranger.

Olivia explained where it was she found the old woman and why she had gone there.

“She’s been talking on the subject for days,” said Miss Egan. “I think it’s letters that she’s looking for, but it may be nothing at all. She mixes everything terribly.”

Olivia was shivering now in her nightdress, more from weariness and nerves than from the chill of the night.

“I wouldn’t speak of it to any of the others, Miss Egan,” she said. “It will only trouble them. And we must be more careful about her in the future.”

The old woman had gone past them now, back into the dark room where she spent her whole life, and the nurse had begun to recover a little of her defiant confidence. She even smiled, the hard, glittering smile which always said, “You cannot do without me, whatever happens.”

Aloud she said, “I can’t imagine what happened, Mrs. Pentland.”

“It was an accident, never mind,” said Olivia. “Good-night. Only I think it’s better not to speak of what has happened. It will only alarm the others.”

But she was puzzled, Olivia, because underneath the dressing-gown Miss Egan had thrown about her shoulders she saw that the nurse was dressed neither in night-clothes nor in her uniform, but in the suit of blue serge that she wore on the rare occasions when she went into the city.

5

She spoke to no one of what had happened, either on the terrace or in the lane or in the depths of the old attic, and the days came to resume again their old monotonous round, as if the strange, hot, disturbing night had had no more existence than a dream. She did not see O’Hara, yet she heard of him, constantly, from Sybil, from Sabine, even from Jack, who seemed stronger than he had ever been and able for a time to go about the farm with his grandfather in the trap drawn by an old white horse. There were moments when it seemed to Olivia that the boy might one day be really well, and yet there was never any real joy in those moments, because always in the back of her mind stood the truth. She knew it would never be, despite all that fierce struggle which she and the old man kept up perpetually against the thing which was stronger than either of them. Indeed, she even found a new sort of sadness in the sight of the pale thin boy and the rugged old man driving along the lanes in the trap, the eyes of the grandfather bright with a look of deluding hope. It was a look which she found unbearable because it was the first time in years, almost since that first day when Jack, as a tiny baby who did not cry enough, came into the world, that the expression of the old man had changed from one of grave and uncomplaining resignation.

Sometimes when she watched them together she was filled with a fierce desire to go to John Pentland and tell him that it was not her fault that there were not more children, other heirs to take the place of Jack. She wanted to tell him that she would have had ten children if it were possible, that even now she was still young enough to have more children. She wanted to pour out to him something of that hunger of life which had swept over her on the night in Sabine’s garden beneath the apple-tree, a spot abounding in fertility. But she knew, too, how impossible it was to discuss a matter which old John Pentland, in the depths of his soul believed to be “indelicate.” Such things were all hidden behind a veil which shut out so much of truth from all their lives. There were times when she fancied he understood it all, those times when he took her hand and kissed her affectionately. She fancied that he understood and that the knowledge lay somehow at the root of the old man’s quiet contempt for his own son.

But she saw well enough the tragedy that lay deep down at the root of the whole matter. She understood that it was not Anson who was to blame. It was that they had all been caught in the toils of something stronger than any of them, a force which with a cruel injustice compelled her to live a dry, monotonous, barren existence when she would have embraced life passionately, which compelled her to watch her own son dying slowly before her eyes.

Always she came back to the same thought, that the boy must be kept alive until his grandfather was dead; and sometimes, standing on the terrace, looking out across the fields, Olivia saw that old Mrs. Soames, dressed absurdly in pink, with a large picture-hat, was riding in the trap with the old man and his grandson, as if in reality she were the grandmother of Jack instead of the mad old woman abovestairs.

The days came to resume their round of dull monotony, and yet there was a difference, odd and indefinable, as if in some way the sun were brighter than it had been, as if those days, when even in the bright sunlight the house had seemed a dull gray place, were gone now. She could no longer look across the meadows toward the bright new chimneys of O’Hara’s house without a sudden quickening of breath, a warm pleasant sensation of no longer standing quite alone.

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.

Sabine was talking again, in a cold, unrelenting voice. “She lay there all those years on the sofa covered with a shawl, trying to arrange the lives of every one about her. She killed Anson’s independence and ruined my happiness. She terrorized her husband until in the end he died to escape her. He was a good-natured man, horrified of scenes and scandals.” Sabine lighted a cigarette and flung away the match with a sudden savage gesture. “And now she goes about like an angel of pity, a very brisk angel of pity, a harpy in angel’s clothing. She has played her rôle well. Every one believes in her as a frail, good, unhappy woman. Some of the saints must have been very like her. Some of them must have been trying old maids.”

She rose and, winding the chiffon scarf about her throat, opened her yellow parasol, saying, “I know I’m right. She’s a virgin. At least,” she added, “in the technical sense, she’s a virgin. I know nothing about her mind.”

And then, changing abruptly, she said, “Will you go up to Boston with me to-morrow? I’m going to do something about my hair. There’s gray beginning to come into it.”

Olivia did not answer her at once, but when she did speak it was to say, “Yes; I’m going to take up riding again and I want to order clothes. My old ones would look ridiculous now. It’s been years since I was on a horse.”

Sabine looked at her sharply and, looking away again, said, “I’ll stop for you about ten o’clock.”

CHAPTER VI

Heat, damp and overwhelming, and thick with the scent of fresh-cut hay and the half-fetid odor of the salt marshes, settled over Durham, reducing all life to a state of tropical relaxation. Even in the mornings when Sybil rode with O’Hara across the meadows, there was no coolness and no dew on the grass. Only Aunt Cassie, thin and wiry, and Anson, guided perpetually by a sense of duty which took no reckoning of such things as weather, resisted the muggy warmth. Aunt Cassie, alike indifferent to heat and cold, storm or calm, continued her indefatigable rounds. Sabine, remarking that she had always known that New England was the hottest place this side of Sheol, settled into a state of complete inertia, not stirring from the house until after the sun had disappeared. Even then her only action was to come to Pentlands to sit in the writing-room playing bridge languidly with Olivia and John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames.

The old lady grew daily more dazed and forgetful and irritating as a fourth at bridge. John Pentland always insisted upon playing with her, saying that they understood each other’s game; but he deceived no one, save Mrs. Soames, whose wits were at best a little dim; the others knew that it was to protect her. They saw him sit calmly and patiently while she bid suits she could not possibly make, while she trumped his tricks and excused herself on the ground of bad eyesight. She had been a great beauty once and she was still, with all her paint and powder, a vain woman. She would not wear spectacles and so played by looking through lorgnettes, which lowered the whole tempo of the game and added to the confusion. At times, in the midst of the old lady’s blunders, a look of murder came into the green eyes of Sabine, but Olivia managed somehow to prevent any outburst; she even managed to force Sabine into playing on, night after night. The patience and tenderness of the old man towards Mrs. Soames moved her profoundly, and she fancied that Sabine, too,—hard, cynical, intolerant Sabine—was touched by it. There was a curious, unsuspected soft spot in Sabine, as if in some way she understood the bond between the two old people. Sabine, who allowed herself to be bored by no one, presently became willing to sit there night after night bearing this special boredom patiently.

Once when Olivia said to her, “We’ll all be old some day. Perhaps we’ll be worse than old Mrs. Soames,” Sabine replied with a shrug of bitterness, “Old age is a bore. That’s the trouble with us, Olivia. We’ll never give up and become old ladies. It used to be the beauties who clung to youth, and now all of us do it. We’ll probably be painted old horrors ... like her.”

“Perhaps,” replied Olivia, and a kind of terror took possession of her at the thought that she would be forty on her next birthday and that nothing lay before her, even in the immediate future, save evenings like these, playing bridge with old people until presently she herself was old, always in the melancholy atmosphere of the big house at Pentlands.

“But I shan’t take to drugs,” said Sabine. “At least I shan’t do that.”

Olivia looked at her sharply. “Who takes drugs?” she asked.

“Why, she does ... old Mrs. Soames. She’s taken drugs for years. I thought every one knew it.”

“No,” said Olivia sadly. “I never knew it.”

Sabine laughed. “You are an innocent,” she answered.

And after Sabine had gone home, the cloud of melancholy clung to her for hours. She felt suddenly that Anson and Aunt Cassie might be right, after all. There was something dangerous in a woman like Sabine, who tore aside every veil, who sacrificed everything to her passion for the truth. Somehow it riddled a world which at its best was not too cheerful.

There were evenings when Mrs. Soames sent word that she was feeling too ill to play, and on those occasions John Pentland drove over to see her, and the bridge was played instead at Brook Cottage with O’Hara and a fourth recruited impersonally from the countryside. To Sabine, the choice was a matter of indifference so long as the chosen one could play well.

It happened on these occasions that O’Hara and Olivia came to play together, making a sort of team, which worked admirably. He played as she knew he would play, aggressively and brilliantly, with a fierce concentration and a determination to win. It fascinated her that a man who had spent most of his life in circles where bridge played no part, should have mastered the intricate game so completely. She fancied him taking lessons with the same passionate application which he had given to his career.

He did not speak to her again of the things he had touched upon during that first hot night on the terrace, and she was careful never to find herself alone with him. She was ashamed at the game she played—of seeing him always with Sabine or riding with Sybil and giving him no chance to speak; it seemed to her that such behavior was cheap and dishonest. Yet she could not bring herself to refuse seeing him, partly because to refuse would have aroused the suspicions of the already interested Sabine, but more because she wanted to see him. She found a kind of delight in the way he looked at her, in the perfection with which they came to understand each other’s game; and though he did not see her alone, he kept telling her in a hundred subtle ways that he was a man in love, who adored her.

She told herself that she was behaving like a silly schoolgirl, but she could not bring herself to give him up altogether. It seemed to her unbearable that she should lose these rare happy evenings. And she was afraid, too, that Sabine would call her a fool.

As early summer turned into July, old Mrs. Soames came less and less frequently to play bridge and there were times when Sabine, dining out or retiring early, left them without any game at all and the old familiar stillness came to settle over the drawing-room at Pentlands ... evenings when Olivia and Sybil played double patience and Anson worked at Mr. Lowell’s desk over the mazes of the Pentland Family history.

On one of these evenings, when Olivia’s eyes had grown weary of reading, she closed her book and, turning toward her husband, called his name. When he did not answer her at once she spoke to him again, and waited until he looked up. Then she said, “Anson, I have taken up riding again. I think it is doing me good.”

But Anson, lost somewhere in the chapter about Savina Pentland and her friendship with Ingres, was not interested and made no answer.

“I go in the mornings,” she repeated, “before breakfast, with Sybil.”

Anson said, “Yes,” again, and then, “I think it an excellent idea—your color is better,” and went back to his work.

So she succeeded in telling him that it was all right about Sybil and O’Hara. She managed to tell him without actually saying it that she would go with them and prevent any entanglement. She had told him, too, without once alluding to the scene of which he was ashamed. And she knew, of course, now, that there was no danger of any entanglement, at least not one which involved Sybil.

Sitting with the book closed in her lap, she remained for a time watching the back of her husband’s head—the thin gray hair, the cords that stood out weakly under the desiccated skin, the too small ears set too close against the skull; and in reality, all the while she was seeing another head set upon a full muscular neck, the skin tanned and glowing with the flush of health, the thick hair short and vigorous; and she felt an odd, inexplicable desire to weep, thinking at the same time, “I am a wicked woman. I must be really bad.” For she had never known before what it was to be in love and she had lived for nearly twenty years in a family where love had occupied a poor forgotten niche.

She was sitting thus when John Pentland came in at last, looking more yellow and haggard than he had been in days. She asked him quietly, so as not to disturb Anson, whether Mrs. Soames was really ill. “No,” said the old man, “I don’t think so; she seems all right, a little tired, that’s all. We’re all growing old.”

He seated himself and began to read like the others, pretending clearly an interest which he did not feel, for Olivia caught him suddenly staring before him in a line beyond the printed page. She saw that he was not reading at all, and in the back of her mind a little cluster of words kept repeating themselves—“a little tired, that’s all, we’re all growing old; a little tired, that’s all, we’re all growing old”—over and over again monotonously, as if she were hypnotizing herself. She found herself, too, staring into space in the same enchanted fashion as the old man. And then, all at once, she became aware of a figure standing in the doorway beckoning to her, and, focusing her gaze, she saw that it was Nannie, clad in a dressing-gown, her old face screwed up in an expression of anxiety. She had some reason for not disturbing the others, for she did not speak. Standing in the shadow, she beckoned; and Olivia, rising quietly, went out into the hall, closing the door behind her.

There, in the dim light, she saw that the old woman had been crying and was shaking in fright. She said, “Something had happened to Jack, something dreadful.”

She had known what it was before Nannie spoke. It seemed to her that she had known all along, and now there was no sense of shock but only a hard, dead numbness of all feeling.

“Call up Doctor Jenkins,” she said, with a kind of dreadful calm, and turning away she went quickly up the long stairs.

In the darkness of her own room she did not wait now to listen for the sound of breathing. It had come at last—the moment when she would enter the room and, listening for the sound, encounter only the stillness of the night. Beyond, in the room which he had occupied ever since he was a tiny baby, there was the usual dim night-light burning in the corner, and by its dull glow she was able to make out the narrow bed and his figure lying there as it had always lain, asleep. He must have been asleep, she thought, for it was impossible to have died so quietly, without moving. But she knew, of course, that he was dead, and she saw how near to death he had always been, how it was only a matter of slipping over, quite simply and gently.

He had escaped them at last—his grandfather and herself—in a moment when they had not been there watching; and belowstairs in the drawing-room John Pentland was sitting with a book in his lap by Mr. Longfellow’s lamp, staring into space, still knowing nothing. And Anson’s pen scratched away at the history of the Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, while here in the room where she stood the Pentland family had come to an end.

She did not weep. She knew that weeping would come later, after the doctor had made his silly futile call to tell her what she already knew. And now that this thing which she had fought for so long had happened, she was aware of a profound peace. It seemed to her even, that the boy, her own son, was happier now; for she had a fear, bordering upon remorse, that they had kept him alive all those years against his will. He looked quiet and still now and not at all as he had looked on those long, terrible nights when she had sat in this same chair by the same bed while, propped among pillows because he could not breathe lying down, he fought for breath and life, more to please her and his grandfather than because he wanted to live. She saw that there could be a great beauty in death. It was not as if he had died alone. He had simply gone to sleep.

She experienced, too, an odd and satisfying feeling of reality, of truth, as if in some way the air all about her had become cleared and freshened. Death was not a thing one could deny by pretense. Death was real. It marked the end of something, definitely and clearly for all time. There could be no deceptions about death.

She wished now that she had told Nannie not to speak to the others. She wanted to stay there alone in the dimly lighted room until the sky turned gray beyond the marshes.

They did not leave her in peace with her son. There came first of all a knock which admitted old Nannie, still trembling and hysterical, followed by the starched and efficient Miss Egan, who bustled about with a hard, professional manner, and then the rattling, noisy sounds of Doctor Jenkins’ Ford as he arrived from the village, and the far-off hoot of a strange motor-horn and a brilliant glare of light as a big motor rounded the corner of the lane at the foot of the drive and swept away toward Brook Cottage. The hall seemed suddenly alive with people, whispering and murmuring together, and there was a sound of hysterical sobbing from some frightened servant. Death, which ought to occur in the quiet beauty of solitude, was being robbed of all its dignity. They would behave like this for days. She knew that it was only now, in the midst of all that pitiful hubbub, that she had lost her son. He had been hers still, after a fashion, while she was alone there in the room.

Abruptly, in the midst of the flurry, she remembered that there were others besides herself. There was Sybil, who had come in and stood beside her, grave and sympathetic, pressing her mother’s hand in silence; and Anson, who stood helplessly in the corner, more awkward and useless and timid than ever in the face of death. But most of all, there was John Pentland. He was not in the room. He was nowhere to be seen.

She went to search for him, because she knew that he would never come there to face all the others; instead, he would hide himself away like a wounded animal. She knew that there was only one person whom he could bear to see. Together they had fought for the life of the boy and together they must face the cold, hard fact of his death.

She found him standing on the terrace, outside the tall windows that opened into the drawing-room, and as she approached, she saw that he was so lost in his sorrow that he did not even notice her. He was like a man in a state of enchantment. He simply stood there, tall and stiff and austere, staring across the marshes in the direction of the sea, alone as he had always been, surrounded by the tragic armor of loneliness that none of them, not even herself, had ever succeeded in piercing. She saw then that there was a grief more terrible than her own. She had lost her son but for John Pentland it was the end of everything. She saw that the whole world had collapsed about him. It was as if he, too, had died.

She did not speak to him at first, but simply stood beside him, taking his huge, bony hand in hers, aware that he did not look at her, but kept staring on and on across the marshes in the direction of the sea. And at last she said softly, “It has happened, at last.”

Still he did not look at her, but he did answer, saying, “I knew,” in a whisper that was barely audible. There were tears on his leathery old cheeks. He had come out into the darkness of the scented garden to weep. It was the only time that she had ever seen tears in the burning black eyes.

Not until long after midnight did all the subdued and vulgar hubbub that surrounds death fade away once more into silence, leaving Olivia alone in the room with Sybil. They did not speak to each other, for they knew well enough the poverty of words, and there was between them no need for speech.

At last Olivia said, “You had best get some sleep, darling; to-morrow will be a troublesome day.”

And then, like a little girl, Sybil came over and seating herself on her mother’s lap put her arms about her neck and kissed her.

The girl said softly, “You are wonderful, Mother. I know that I’ll never be so wonderful a woman. We should have spared you to-night, all of us, and instead of that, it was you who managed everything.” Olivia only kissed her and even smiled a little at Sybil. “I think he’s happier. He’ll never be tired again as he used to be.”

She had risen to leave when both of them heard, far away, somewhere in the distance, the sound of music. It came to them vaguely and in snatches borne in by the breeze from the sea, music that was filled with a wild, barbaric beat, that rose and fell with a passionate sense of life. It seemed to Olivia that there was in the sound of it some dark power which, penetrating the stillness of the old house, shattered the awesome silence that had settled down at last with the approach of death. It was as if life were celebrating its victory over death, in a savage, wild, exultant triumph.

It was music, too, that sounded strange and passionate in the thin, clear air of the New England night, such music as none of them had ever heard there before; and slowly, as it rose to a wild crescendo of sound, Olivia recognized it—the glowing barbaric music of the tribal dances in Prince Igor, being played brilliantly with a sense of abandoned joy.

At the same moment Sybil looked at her mother and said, “It’s Jean de Cyon.... I’d forgotten that he was arriving to-night.” And then sadly, “Of course he doesn’t know.”

There was a sudden light in the girl’s eye, the merest flicker, dying out again quickly, which had a strange, intimate relation to the passionate music. Again it was life triumphing in death. Long afterward Olivia remembered it well ... the light of something which went on and on.

CHAPTER VII

1

The news reached Aunt Cassie only the next morning at ten and it brought her, full of reproaches and tears, over the dusty lanes to Pentlands. She was hurt, she said, because they had not let her know at once. “I should have risen from my bed and come over immediately,” she repeated. “I was sleeping very badly, in any case. I could have managed everything. You should have sent for Aunt Cassie at once.”

And Olivia could not tell her that they had kept her in ignorance for that very reason—because they knew she would rise from her bed and come over at once.

Aunt Cassie it was who took the burden of the grief upon her narrow shoulders. She wept in the manner of a professional mourner. She drew the shades in the drawing-room, because in her mind death was not respectable unless the rooms were darkened, and sat there in a corner receiving callers, as if she were the one most bereft, as if indeed she were the only one who suffered at all. She returned to her own cupolaed dwelling only late at night and took all her meals at Pentlands, to the annoyance of her brother, who on the second day in the midst of lunch turned to her abruptly and said: “Cassie, if you can’t stop this eternal blubbering, I wish you’d eat at home. It doesn’t help anything.”

At which she had risen from the table, in a sudden climax of grief and persecution, to flee, sobbing and hurt, from the room. But she was not insulted sufficiently to take her meals at home. She stayed on at Pentlands because, she said, “They needed some one like me to help out....” And to the trembling, inefficient Miss Peavey, who came and went like a frightened rabbit on errands for her, she confided her astonishment that her brother and Olivia should treat death with such indifference. They did not weep; they showed no signs of grief. She was certain that they lacked sensibility. They did not feel the tragedy. And, weeping again, she would launch into memories of the days when the boy had come as a little fellow to sit, pale and listless, on the floor of her big, empty drawing-room, turning the pages of the Doré Bible.

And to Miss Peavey she also said, “It’s at times like this that one’s breeding comes out. Olivia has failed for the first time. She doesn’t understand the things one must do at a time like this. If she had been brought up properly, here among us....”

For with Aunt Cassie death was a mechanical, formalized affair which one observed by a series of traditional gestures.

It was a remarkable bit of luck, she said, that Bishop Smallwood (Sabine’s Apostle to the Genteel) was still in the neighborhood and could conduct the funeral services. It was proper that one of Pentland blood should bury a Pentland (as if no one else were quite worthy of such an honor). And she went to see the Bishop to discuss the matter of the services. She planned that immensely intricate affair, the seating of relations and connections—all the Canes and Struthers and Mannerings and Sutherlands and Pentlands—at the church. She called on Sabine to tell her that whatever her feelings about funerals might be, it was her duty to attend this one. Sabine must remember that she was back again in a world of civilized people who behaved as ladies and gentlemen. And to each caller whom she received in the darkened drawing-room, she confided the fact that Sabine must be an unfeeling, inhuman creature, because she had not even paid a visit to Pentlands.

But she did not know what Olivia and John Pentland knew—that Sabine had written a short, abrupt, almost incoherent note, with all the worn, tattered, pious old phrases missing, which had meant more to them than any of the cries and whispering and confusion that went on belowstairs, where the whole countryside passed in and out in an endless procession.

When Miss Peavey was not at hand to run errands for her, she made Anson her messenger.... Anson, who wandered about helpless and lost and troubled because death had interrupted the easy, eventless flow of a life in which usually all moved according to a set plan. Death had upset the whole household. It was impossible to know how Anson Pentland felt over the death of his son. He did not speak at all, and now that “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” had been laid aside in the midst of the confusion and Mr. Lowell’s desk stood buried beneath floral offerings, there was nothing to do but wander about getting in the way of every one and drawing upon his head the sharp reproofs of Aunt Cassie.

It was Aunt Cassie and Anson who opened the great box of roses that came from O’Hara. It was Aunt Cassie’s thin, blue-veined hand that tore open the envelope addressed plainly to “Mrs. Anson Pentland.” It was Aunt Cassie who forced Anson to read what was written inside:

“Dear Mrs. Pentland,

You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more.

Michael O’Hara.”

And it was Aunt Cassie who said, “Impertinent! Why should he send flowers at all?” And Aunt Cassie who read the note again and again, as if she might find in some way a veiled meaning behind the two cryptic sentences. It was Aunt Cassie who carried the note to Olivia and watched her while she read it and laid it quietly aside on her dressing-table. And when she had discovered nothing she said to Olivia, “It seems to me impertinent of him to send flowers and write such a note. What is he to us here at Pentlands?”

Olivia looked at her a little wearily and said, “What does it matter whether he is impertinent or not? Besides, he was a great friend of Jack’s.” And then, straightening her tired body, she looked at Aunt Cassie and said slowly, “He is also a friend of mine.”

It was the first time that the division of forces had stood revealed, even for a second, the first time that Olivia had shown any feeling for O’Hara, and there was something ominous in the quietness of a speech made so casually. She ended any possible discussion by leaving the room in search of Anson, leaving Aunt Cassie disturbed by the sensation of alarm which attacked her when she found herself suddenly face to face with the mysterious and perilous calm that sometimes took possession of Olivia. Left alone in the room, she took up the note again from the dressing-table and read it through for the twentieth time. There was nothing in it ... nothing on which one could properly even pin a suspicion.

So, in the midst of death, enveloped by the odor of tuberoses, the old lady rose triumphant, a phoenix from ashes. In some way she found in tragedy her proper rôle and she managed to draw most of the light from the other actors to herself. She must have known that people went away from the house saying, “Cassie rises to such occasions beautifully. She has taken everything on her own shoulders.” She succeeded in conveying the double impression that she suffered far more than any of the others and that none of the others could possibly have done without her.

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.

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?”

Aunt Cassie showed signs of breaking down once more. “You see, I’m always blamed for everything. I was thinking of the family all these years. We couldn’t have Horace running around loose in Boston.” She broke off with a sudden, fastidious gesture of disgust, as if she were washing her hands of the whole affair. “I could have managed it better myself. He ought never to have been brought home ... to stir it all up again.”

Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt Cassie. “He wanted to be buried here.... He wrote to ask me, when he was dying.”

“He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his behavior. I say it again and I’ll keep on saying it. He ought never to have been brought back here ... after people even forgot whether he was alive or dead.”

The perilous calm had settled over Olivia.... She had been looking out of the window across the marshes into the distance, and when she turned she spoke with a terrible quietness. She said: “You may do with Horace Pentland’s body what you like. It is more your affair than mine, for I never saw him in my life. But it is my son who is dead ... my son, who belongs to me more than to any of you. You may bury Horace Pentland on the same day ... at the same service, even in the same grave. Things like that can’t matter very much after death. You can’t go on pretending forever.... Death is too strong for that. It’s stronger than any of us puny creatures because it’s the one truth we can’t avoid. It’s got nothing to do with prejudices and pride and respectability. In a hundred years—even in a year, in a month, what will it matter what we’ve done with Horace Pentland’s body?”

She rose, still enveloped in the perilous calm, and said: “I’ll leave Horace Pentland to you two. There is none of his blood in my veins. Whatever you do, I shall not object ... only I wouldn’t be too shabby in dealing with death.”

She went out, leaving Aunt Cassie exhausted and breathless and confused. The old woman had won her battle about the burial of Horace Pentland, yet she had suffered a great defeat. She must have seen that she had really lost everything, for Olivia somehow had gone to the root of things, in the presence of John Pentland, who was himself so near to death. (Olivia daring to say proudly, as if she actually scorned the Pentland name, “There is none of his blood in my veins.”)

But it was a defeat which Olivia knew she would never admit: that was one of the qualities which made it impossible to deal with Aunt Cassie. Perhaps, even as she sat there dabbing at her eyes, she was choosing new weapons for a struggle which had come at last into the open because it was impossible any longer to do battle through so weak and shifting an ally as Anson.

She was a natural martyr, Aunt Cassie. Martyrdom was the great feminine weapon of her Victorian day and she was practised in it; she had learned all its subtleties in the years she had lain wrapped in a shawl on a sofa subduing the full-blooded Mr. Struthers.

And Olivia knew as she left the room that in the future she would have to deal with a poor, abused, invalid aunt who gave all her strength in doing good works and received in return only cruelty and heartlessness from an outsider, from an intruder, a kind of adventuress who had wormed her way into the heart of the Pentland family. Aunt Cassie, by a kind of art of which she possessed the secret, would somehow make it all seem so.

2

The heat did not go away. It hung in a quivering cloud over the whole countryside, enveloping the black procession which moved through the lanes into the highroad and thence through the clusters of ugly stucco bungalows inhabited by the mill-workers, on its way past the deserted meeting-house where Preserved Pentland had once harangued a tough and sturdy congregation and the Rev. Josiah Milford had set out with his flock for the Western Reserve.... It enveloped the black, slow-moving procession to the very doors of the cool, ivy-covered stone church (built like a stage piece to imitate some English county church) where the Pentlands worshiped the more polite, compromising gods scorned and berated by the witch-burner. On the way, beneath the elms of High Street, Polish women and children stopped to stare and cross themselves at the sight of the grand procession.

The little church seemed peaceful after the heat and the stir of the Durham street, peaceful and hushed and crowded to the doors by the relatives and connections of the family. Even the back pews were filled by the poor half-forgotten remnants of the family who had no wealth to carry them smoothly along the stream of life. Old Mrs. Featherstone (who did washing) was there sobbing because she sobbed at all funerals, and old Miss Haddon, the genteel Pentland cousin, dressed even in the midst of summer in her inevitable cape of thick black broadcloth, and Mrs. Malson, shabby-genteel in her foulards and high-pitched bonnet, and Miss Murgatroyd whose bullfinch house was now “Ye Witch’s Broome” where one got bad tea and melancholy sandwiches....

Together Bishop Smallwood and Aunt Cassie had planned a service calculated skilfully to harrow the feelings and give full scope to the vast emotional capacities of their generation and background.

They chose the most emotional of hymns, and Bishop Smallwood, renowned for his effect upon pious and sentimental old ladies, said a few insincere and pompous words which threw Aunt Cassie and poor old Mrs. Featherstone into fresh excesses of grief. The services for the boy became a barbaric rite dedicated not to his brief and pathetic existence but to a glorification of the name he bore and of all those traits—the narrowness, the snobbery, the lower middle-class respect for property—which had culminated in the lingering tragedy of his sickly life. In their respective pews Anson and Aunt Cassie swelled with pride at the mention of the Pentland ancestry. Even the sight of the vigorous, practical, stocky Polish women staring round-eyed at the funeral procession a little before, returned to them now in a wave of pride and secret elation. The same emotion in some way filtered back through the little church from the pulpit where Bishop Smallwood (with the sob in his voice which had won him prizes at the seminary) stood surrounded by midsummer flowers, through all the relatives and connections, until far in the back among the more obscure and remote ones it became simply a pride in their relation to New England and the ancient dying village that was fast disappearing beneath the inroads of a more vigorous world. Something of the Pentland enchantment engulfed them all, even old Mrs. Featherstone, with her poor back bent from washing to support the four defective grandchildren who ought never to have been born. Through her facile tears (she wept because it was the only pleasure left her) there shone the light of a pride in belonging to these people who had persecuted witches and evolved transcendentalism and Mr. Lowell and Doctor Holmes and the good, kind Mr. Longfellow. It raised her somehow above the level of those hardy foreigners who worshiped the Scarlet Woman of Rome and jostled her on the sidewalks of High Street.

In all the little church there were only two or three, perhaps, who escaped that sudden mystical surge of self-satisfaction.... O’Hara, who was forever outside the caste, and Olivia and old John Pentland, sitting there side by side so filled with sorrow that they did not even resent the antics of Bishop Smallwood. Sabine (who had come, after all, to the services) sensed the intensity of the engulfing emotion. It filled her with a sense of slow, cold, impotent rage.

As the little procession left the church, wiping its eyes and murmuring in lugubrious tones, the clouds which a little earlier had sprung up against the distant horizon began to darken the whole sky. The air became so still that the leaves on the tall, drooping elms hung as motionless as leaves in a painted picture, and far away, gently at first, and then with a slow, increasing menace, rose the sound of distant echoing thunder. Ill at ease, the mourners gathered in little groups about the steps, regarding alternately the threatening sky and the waiting hearse, and presently, one by one, the more timorous ones began to drift sheepishly away. Others followed them slowly until by the time the coffin was borne out, they had all melted away save for the members of the “immediate family” and one or two others. Sabine remained, and O’Hara and old Mrs. Soames (leaning on John Pentland’s arm as if it were her grandson who was dead), and old Miss Haddon in her black cape, and the pall-bearers, and of course Bishop Smallwood and the country rector who, in the presence of this august and saintly pillar of the church, had faded to insignificance. Besides these there were one or two other relatives, like Struthers Pentland, a fussy little bald man (cousin of John Pentland and of the disgraceful Horace), who had never married but devoted himself instead to fathering the boys of his classes at Harvard.

It was this little group which entered the motors and hurried off after the hearse in its shameless race with the oncoming storm.

The town burial-ground lay at the top of a high, bald hill where the first settlers of Durham had chosen to dispose of their dead, and the ancient roadway that led up to it was far too steep and stony to permit the passing of motors, so that part way up the hill the party was forced to descend and make the remainder of the journey on foot. As they assembled, silently but in haste, about the open, waiting grave, the sound of the thunder accompanied now by wild flashes of lightning, drew nearer and nearer, and the leaves of the stunted trees and shrubs which a moment before had been so still, began to dance and shake madly in the green light that preceded the storm.

Bishop Smallwood, by nature a timorous man, stood beside the grave opening his jewel-encrusted Prayer Book (he was very High Church and fond of incense and precious stones) and fingering the pages nervously, now looking down at them, now regarding the stolid Polish grave-diggers who stood about waiting to bury the last of the Pentlands. There were irritating small delays, but at last everything was ready and the Bishop, reading as hastily as he dared, began the service in a voice less rich and theatrical than usual.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord....”

And what followed was lost in a violent crash of thunder so that the Bishop was able to omit a line or two without being discovered. The few trees on the bald hill began to sway and rock, bending low toward the earth, and the crape veils of the women performed wild black writhings. In the uproar of wind and thunder only a sentence or two of the service became audible....

“For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that the past is as a watch in the night....”

And then again a wild, angry Nature took possession of the services, drowning out the anxious voice of the Bishop and the loud theatrical sobs of Aunt Cassie, and again there was a sudden breathless hush and the sound of the Bishop’s voice, so pitiful and insignificant in the midst of the storm, reading....

“O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

And again:

“For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God in His Providence to take out of the world the soul of our deceased brother.”

And at last, with relief, the feeble, reedlike voice, repeating with less monotony than usual: “The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen.”

Sabine, in whose hard nature there lay some hidden thing which exulted in storms, barely heard the service. She stood there watching the wild beauty of the sky and the distant sea and the marshes and thinking how different a thing the burial of the first Pentland must have been from the timorous, hurried rite that marked the passing of the last. She kept seeing those first fanatical, hard-faced, rugged Puritans standing above their tombs like ghosts watching ironically the genteel figure of the Apostle to the Genteel and his jeweled Prayer Book....

The Polish grave-diggers set about their work stolidly indifferent to the storm, and before the first motor had started down the steep and stony path, the rain came with a wild, insane violence, sweeping inward in a wall across the sea and the black marshes. Sabine, at the door of her motor, raised her head and breathed deeply, as if the savage, destructive force of the storm filled her with a kind of ecstasy.

On the following day, cool after the storm and bright and clear, a second procession made its way up the stony path to the top of the bald hill, only this time Bishop Smallwood was not there, nor Cousin Struthers Pentland, for they had both been called away suddenly and mysteriously. And Anson Pentland was not there because he would have nothing to do with a blackguard like Horace Pentland, even in death. In the little group about the open grave stood Olivia and John Pentland and Aunt Cassie, who had come because, after all, the dead man’s name was Pentland, and Miss Haddon, (in her heavy broadcloth cape), who never missed any funeral and had learned about this one from her friend, the undertaker, who kept her perpetually au courant. There were not even any friends to carry the coffin to the grave, and so this labor was divided between the undertaker’s men and the grave-diggers....

And the service began again, read this time by the rector, who since the departure of the Bishop seemed to have grown a foot in stature....

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord....

“For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is past as a watch in the night....

“O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

Aunt Cassie wept again, though the performance was less good than on the day before, but Olivia and John Pentland stood in silence while Horace Pentland was buried at last in the midst of that little colony of grim and respectable dead.

Sabine was there, too, standing at a little distance, as if she had a contempt for all funerals. She had known Horace Pentland in life and she had gone to see him in his long exile whenever her wanderings led her to the south of France, less from affection than because it irritated the others in the family. (He must have been happier in that warm, rich country than he could ever have been in this cold, stony land.) But she had come to-day less for sentimental reasons than because it gave her the opportunity of a triumph over Aunt Cassie. She could watch Aunt Cassie out of her cold green eyes while they all stood about to bury the family skeleton. Sabine, who had not been to a funeral in the twenty-five years since her father’s death, had climbed the stony hill to the Durham town burial-ground twice in as many days....

The rector was speaking again....

“The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen.”

The little group turned away in silence, and in silence disappeared over the rim of the hill down the steep path. The secret burial was finished and Horace Pentland was left alone with the Polish grave-diggers, come home at last.

3

The peace which had taken possession of Olivia as she sat alone by the side of her dead son, returned to her slowly with the passing of the excitement over the funeral. Indeed, she was for once thankful for the listless, futile enchantment which invested the quiet old world. It soothed her at a moment when, all interest having departed from life, she wanted merely to be left in peace. She came to see for a certainty that there was no tragedy in her son’s death; the only tragedy had been that he had ever lived at all such a baffled, painful, hopeless existence. And now, after so many years of anxiety, there was peace and a relaxation that seemed strange and in a way delicious ... moments when, lying in the chaise longue by the window overlooking the marshes, she was enveloped by deep and healing solitude. Even the visits of Aunt Cassie, who would have forced her way into Olivia’s room in the interests of “duty,” made only a vague, dreamlike impression. The old lady became more and more a droning, busy insect, the sound of whose buzzing grew daily more distant and vague, like the sound of a fly against a window-pane heard through veils of sleep.

From her window she sometimes had a distant view of the old man, riding alone now, in the trap across the fields behind the old white horse, and sometimes she caught a glimpse of his lean figure riding the savage red mare along the lanes. He no longer went alone with the mare; he had yielded to Higgins’ insistent warnings of her bad temper and permitted the groom to go with him, always at his side or a little behind to guard him, riding a polo pony with an ease and grace which made horse and man seem a single creature ... a kind of centaur. On a horse the ugliness of the robust, animal little man seemed to flow away. It was as if he had been born thus, on a horse, and was awkward and ill at ease with his feet on the earth.

And Olivia knew the thought that was always in the mind of her father-in-law as he rode across the stony, barren fields. He was thinking all the while that all this land, all this fortune, even Aunt Cassie’s carefully tended pile, would one day belong to a family of some other name, perhaps a name which he had never even heard.

There were no more Pentlands. Sybil and her husband would be rich, enormously so, with the Pentland money and Olivia’s money ... but there would never be any more Pentlands. It had all come to an end in this ... futility and oblivion. In another hundred years the name would exist, if it existed at all, only as a memory, embalmed within the pages of Anson’s book.

The new melancholy which settled over the house came in the end even to touch the spirit of Sybil, so young and so eager for experience, like a noxious mildew. Olivia noticed it first in a certain shadowy listlessness that seemed to touch every action of the girl, and then in an occasional faint sigh of weariness, and in the visits the girl paid her in her room, and in the way she gave up willingly evenings at Brook Cottage to stay at home with her mother. She saw that Sybil, who had always been so eager, was touched by the sense of futility which she (Olivia) had battled for so long. And Sybil, Sybil of them all, alone possessed the chance of being saved.

She thought, “I must not come to lean on her. I must not be the sort of mother who spoils the life of her child.”

And when John Pentland came to sit listlessly by her side, sometimes in silence, sometimes making empty speeches that meant nothing in an effort to cover his despair, she saw that he, too, had come to her for the strength which she alone could give him. Even old Mrs. Soames had failed him, for she lay ill again and able to see him only for a few minutes each day. (It was Sabine’s opinion, uttered during one of her morning visits, that these strange sudden illnesses came from overdoses of drugs.)

So she came to see that she was being a coward to abandon the struggle now, and she rose one morning almost at dawn to put on her riding-clothes and set out with Sybil across the wet meadows to meet O’Hara. She returned with something of her pallor gone and a manner almost of gaiety, her spirit heightened by the air, the contact with O’Hara and the sense of having taken up the struggle once more.

Sabine, always watchful, noticed the difference and put it down to the presence of O’Hara alone, and in this she was not far wrong, for set down there in Durham, he affected Olivia powerfully as one who had no past but only a future. With him she could talk of things which lay ahead—of his plans for the farm he had bought, of Sybil’s future, of his own reckless, irresistible career.

O’Hara himself had come to a dangerous state of mind. He was one of those men who seek fame and success less for the actual rewards than for the satisfaction of the struggle, the fierce pleasure of winning with all the chances against one. He had won successes already. He had his house, his horses, his motor, his well-tailored clothes, and he knew the value of these things, not only in the world of Durham, but in the slums and along the wharves of Boston. He had no illusions about the imperfect workings of democracy. He knew (perhaps because, having begun at the very bottom, he had fought his way very near to the top) that the poor man expects a politician to be something of a splendorous affair, especially when he has begun his career as a very common and ordinary sort of poor man. O’Hara was not playing his game foolishly or recklessly. When he visited the slums or sat in at political meetings, he was a sort of universal common man, a brother to all. When he addressed a large meeting or presided at an assembly, he arrived in a glittering motor and appeared in the elegant clothes suitable to a representative of the government, of power; and so he reflected credit on those men who had played with him as boys along India Wharf and satisfied the universal hunger in man for something more splendorous than the machinery of a perfect democracy.

He understood the game perfectly and made no mistakes, for he had had the best of all training—that of knowing all sorts of people in all sorts of conditions. In himself, he embodied them all, if the simple and wholly kindly and honest were omitted; for he was really not a simple man nor a wholly honest one and he was too ruthless to be kindly. He understood people (as Sabine had guessed), with their little prides and vanities and failings and ambitions.

Aunt Cassie and Anson in the rigidity of their minds had been unjust in thinking that their world was the goal of his ambitions. They had, in the way of those who depend on their environment as a justification for their own existence, placed upon it a value out of all proportion in the case of a man like O’Hara. To them it was everything, the ultimate to be sought on this earth, and so they supposed it must seem to O’Hara. It would have been impossible for them to believe that he considered it only as a small part of his large scheme of life and laid siege to it principally for the pleasure that he found in the battle; for it was true that O’Hara, once he had won, would not know what to do with the fruits of his victory.

Already he himself had begun to see this. He had begun to understand that the victory was so easy that the battle held little savor for him. Moments of satisfaction such as that which had overtaken him as he sat talking to Sabine were growing more and more rare ... moments when he would stop and think, “Here am I, Michael O’Hara, a nobody ... son of a laborer and a housemaid, settled in the midst of such a world as Durham, talking to such a woman as Mrs. Cane Callendar.”

No, the savor was beginning to fail, to go out of the struggle. He was beginning to be bored, and as he grew bored he grew also restless and unhappy.

Born in the Roman Catholic church, he was really neither a very religious nor a very superstitious man. He was skeptic enough not to believe all the faiths the church sought to impose upon him, yet he was not skeptic enough to find peace of mind in an artificial will to believe. For so long a time he had relied wholly upon himself that the idea of leaning for support, even in lonely, restless moments, upon a God or a church, never even occurred to him. He remained outwardly a Roman Catholic because by denying the faith he would have incurred the enmity of the church and many thousands of devout Irish and Italians. The problem simply did not concern him deeply one way or the other.

And so he had come, guided for the moment by no very strong passion, into the doldrums of confusion and boredom. Even his fellow-politicians in Boston saw the change in him and complained that he displayed no very great interest in the campaign to send him to Congress. He behaved at times as if it made not the slightest difference to him whether he was elected to Congress or not ... he, this Michael O’Hara who was so valuable to his party, so engaging and shrewd, who could win for it almost anything he chose.

And though he took care that no one should divine it, this strange state of mind troubled him more deeply than any of his friends. He was assailed by the certainty that there was something lacking from his life, something very close to the foundations. Now that he was inactive and bored, he had begun to think of himself for the first time. The fine, glorious burst of first youth, when everything seemed part of a splendid game, was over and done now, and he felt himself slipping away toward the borderland of middle-age. Because he was a man of energy and passion, who loved life, he felt the change with a keen sense of sadness. There was a kind of horror for him in the idea of a lowered tempo of life—a fear that filled him at times with a passionately satisfactory sort of Gaelic melancholy.

In such moments, he had quite honestly taken stock of all he possessed, and found the amassed result bitterly unsatisfactory. He had a good enough record. He was decidedly more honorable than most men in such a dirty business as politics—indeed, far more honorable and freer from spites and nastinesses than many of those who had come out of this very sacred Durham world. He had made enough money in the course of his career, and he was winning his battle in Durham. Yet at thirty-five life had begun to slacken, to lose some of that zest which once had led him to rise every morning bursting with animal spirits, his brain all a-glitter with fascinating schemes.

And then, in the very midst of this perilous state of mind, he discovered one morning that the old sensation of delight at rising had returned to him, only it was not because his brain was filled with fascinating schemes. He arose with an interest in life because he knew that in a little while he would see Olivia Pentland. He arose, eager to fling himself on his horse and, riding across the meadows, to wait by the abandoned gravel-pit until he saw her coming over the dew-covered fields, radiant, it seemed to him, as the morning itself. On the days when she did not come it was as if the bottom had dropped out of his whole existence.

It was not that he was a man encountering the idea of woman for the first time. There had been women in his life always, since the very first bedraggled Italian girl he had met as a boy among the piles of lumber along the wharves. There had been women always because it was impossible for a man so vigorous and full of zest, so ruthless and so scornful, to have lived thirty-five years without them, and because he was an attractive man, filled when he chose to be, with guile and charm, whom women found it difficult to resist. There had been plenty of women, kept always in the background, treated as a necessity and prevented skilfully from interfering with the more important business of making a career.

But with Olivia Pentland, something new and disturbing had happened to him ... something which, in his eagerness to encompass all life and experience, possessed an overwhelming sensuous fascination. She was not simply another woman in a procession of considerable length. Olivia Pentland, he found, was different from any of the others ... a woman of maturity, poised, beautiful, charming and intelligent, and besides all these things she possessed for him a kind of fresh and iridescent bloom, the same freshness, only a little saddened, that touched her young daughter.

In the beginning, when they had talked together while she planned the garden at Brook Cottage, he had found himself watching her, lost in a kind of wonder, so that he scarcely understood what she was saying. And all the while he kept thinking, “Here is a wonderful woman ... the most wonderful I’ve ever seen or will ever see again ... a woman who could make life a different affair for me, who would make of love something which people say it is.”

She had affected him thus in a way that swept aside all the vulgar and cynical coarseness with which a man of such experience is likely to invest the whole idea of woman. Until now women had seemed to him made to entertain men or to provide children for them, and now he saw that there was, after all, something in this sentiment with which people surrounded a love affair. For a long time he searched for a word to describe Olivia and in the end he fell back upon the old well-worn one which she always brought to mind. She was a “lady”—and as such she had an overwhelming effect upon his imagination.

He had said to himself that here was a woman who could understand him, not in the aloof, analytical fashion of a clever woman like Sabine Callendar, but in quite another way. She was a woman to whom he could say, “I am thus and so. My life has been of this kind. My motives are of this sort,” and she would understand, the bad with the good. She would be the one person in the world to whom he could pour out the whole burden of secrets, the one woman who could ever destroy the weary sense of loneliness which sometimes afflicted him. She made him feel that, for all his shrewdness and hard-headed scheming, she was far wiser than he would ever be, that in a way he was a small boy who might come to her and, burying his head in her lap, have her stroke his thick black hair. She would understand that there were times when a man wanted to be treated thus. In her quiet way she was a strong woman, unselfish, too, who did not feed upon flattery and perpetual attention, the sort of woman who is precious to a man bent upon a career. The thought of her filled him with a poignant feeling of sadness, but in his less romantic moments he saw, too, that she held the power of catching him up out of his growing boredom. She would be of great value to him.

And so Sabine had not been far wrong when she thought of him as the small boy sitting on the curbstone who had looked up at her gravely and said, “I’m playing.” He was at times very like such an image.

But in the end he was always brought up abruptly against the hard reality of the fact that she was already married to a man who did not want her himself but who would never set her free, a man who perhaps would have sacrificed everything in the world to save a scandal in his family. And beyond these hard, tangible difficulties he discerned, too, the whole dark decaying web, less obvious but none the less potent, in which she had become enmeshed.

Yet these obstacles only created a fascination to a mind so complex, so perverse, for in the solitude of his mind and in the bitterness of the long struggle he had known, he came to hold the whole world in contempt and saw no reason why he should not take what he wanted from this Durham world. Obstacles such as these provided the material for a new battle, a new source of interest in the turbulent stream of his existence; only this time there was a difference ... that he coveted the prize itself more than the struggle. He wanted Olivia Pentland, strangely enough, not for a moment or even for a month or a year, but for always.

He waited because he understood, in the shrewdness of his long experience, that to be insistent would only startle such a woman and cause him to lose her entirely, and because he knew of no plan of action which could overcome the obstacles which kept them apart. He waited, as he had done many times in his career, for circumstances to solve themselves. And while he waited, with each time that he saw her she grew more and more desirable, and his own invincible sense of caution became weaker and weaker.

4

In those long days spent in her room, Olivia had come slowly to be aware of the presence of the newcomer at Brook Cottage. It had begun on the night of Jack’s death with the sound of his music drifting across the marshes, and after the funeral Sabine had talked of him to Olivia with an enthusiasm curiously foreign to her. Once or twice she had caught a glimpse of him crossing the meadows toward O’Hara’s shining chimneys or going down the road that led through the marshes to the sea—a tall, red-haired young man who walked with a slight limp. Sybil, she found, was strangely silent about him, but when she questioned the girl about her plans for the day she found, more often than not, that they had to do with him. When she spoke of him, Sybil had a way of blushing and saying, “He’s very nice, Mother. I’ll bring him over when you want to see people.... I used to know him in Paris.”

And Olivia, wisely, did not press her questions. Besides, Sabine had told her almost all there was to know ... perhaps more than Sybil herself knew.

Sabine said, “He belongs to a rather remarkable family ... wilful, reckless and full of spirit. His mother is probably the most remarkable of them all. She’s a charming woman who has lived luxuriously in Paris most of her life ... not one of the American colony. She doesn’t ape any one and she’s incapable of pretense of any sort. She’s lived, rather alone, over there on money ... quite a lot of money ... which seems to come out of steel-mills in some dirty town of the Middle West. She’s one of my great friends ... a woman of no intellect, but very beautiful and blessed with a devastating charm. She is one of the women who was born for men.... She’s irresistible to them, and I imagine there have been men in her life always. She was made for men, but her taste is perfect, so her morals don’t matter.”

The woman ... indeed all Jean de Cyon’s family ... seemed to fascinate Sabine as she sat having tea with Olivia, for she went on and on, talking far more than usual, describing the house of Jean’s mother, her friends, the people whom one met at her dinners, all there was to tell about her.

“She’s the sort of woman who has existed since the beginning of time. There’s some mystery about her early life. It has something to do with Jean’s father. I don’t think she was happy with him. He’s never mentioned. Of course, she’s married again now to a Frenchman ... much older than herself ... a man, very distinguished, who has been in three cabinets. That’s where the boy gets his French name. The old man has adopted him and treats him like his own son. De Cyon is a good name in France, one of the best; but of course Jean hasn’t any French blood. He’s pure American, but he’s never seen his own country until now.”

Sabine finished her tea and putting her cup back on the Regence table (which had come from Olivia’s mother and so found its graceful way into a house filled with stiff early American things), she added, “It’s a remarkable family ... wild and restless. Jean had an aunt who died in the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, and his cousin is Lilli Barr ... a really great musician.” She looked out of the window and after a moment said in a low voice, “Lilli Barr is the woman whom my husband married ... but she divorced him, too, and now we are friends ... she and I.” The familiar hard, metallic laugh returned and she added, “I imagine our experience with him made us sympathetic.... You see, I know the family very well. It’s the sort of blood which produces people with a genius for life ... for living in the moment.”

She did not say that Jean and his mother and the ruthless cousin Lilli Barr fascinated her because they stood in a way for the freedom toward which she had been struggling through all the years since she escaped from Durham. They were free in a way from countries, from towns, from laws, from prejudices, even in a way from nationality. She had hoped once that Jean might interest himself in her own sullen, independent, clever Thérèse, but in her knowledge of the world she had long ago abandoned that hope, knowing that a boy so violent and romantic, so influenced by an upbringing among Frenchmen, a youth so completely masculine, was certain to seek a girl more soft and gentle and feminine than Thérèse. She knew it was inevitable that he should fall in love with a girl like Sybil, and in a way she was content because it fell in admirably with her own indolent plans. The Pentlands were certain to look upon Jean de Cyon as a sort of gipsy, and when they knew the whole truth....

The speculation fascinated her. The summer in Durham, even with the shadow of Jack’s death flung across it, was not proving as dreadful as she had feared; and this new development interested her as something she had never before observed ... an idyllic love affair between two young people who each seemed to her a perfect, charming creature.

5

It had all begun on the day nearly a year earlier when all Paris was celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil had gone with Thérèse and Sabine to lay a wreath beside the flame at the Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment). And afterward she played in the garden with the dogs which they would not let her keep at the school in Saint-Cloud, and then she had gone into the house to find there a fascinating and beautiful woman of perhaps fifty—a Madame de Cyon, who had come to lunch, with her son, a young man of twenty-four, tall, straight and slender, with red hair and dark blue eyes and a deep, pleasant voice. On account of the day he was dressed in his cuirassier’s uniform of black and silver, and because of an old wound he walked with a slight limp. Almost at once (she remembered this when she thought of him) he had looked at her in a frank, admiring way which gave her a sense of pleasurable excitement wholly new in her experience.

Something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the Marseillaise and the Sambre et Meuse, the sight of the soldiers in the street and the great Arc with the flame burning there ... something in the feel of Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of her. It was something which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.

She knew vaguely that she must have fallen in love in the moment she stood there in Sabine Callendar’s salon bowing to Lily de Cyon. The experience had grown in intensity when, after lunch, she took him into the garden to show him her dogs and watched him rubbing the ears of the Doberman “Imp” and talking to the dog softly in a way which made her know that he felt about animals as she did. He had been so pleasant in his manner, so gentle in his bigness, so easy to talk to, as if they had always been friends.

And then almost at once he had gone away to the Argentine, without even seeing her again, on a trip to learn the business of cattle-raising because he had the idea that one day he might settle himself as a rancher. But he left behind him a vivid image which with the passing of time grew more and more intense in the depths of a romantic nature which revolted at the idea of Thérèse choosing a father scientifically for her child. It was an image by which she had come, almost unconsciously, to measure other men, even to such small details as the set of their shoulders and the way they used their hands and the timbre of their voices. It was this she had really meant when she said to her mother, “I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly.” She had meant, quite without knowing it, that it must be a man like Jean de Cyon ... charming, romantic and a little wild.

She had not forgotten him, though there were moments at the school in Saint-Cloud when she had believed she would never see him again—moments when she was swept by a delicious sense of hopeless melancholy in which she believed that her whole life had been blighted, and which led her to make long and romantic entries in the diary that was kept hidden beneath her mattress. And so as she grew more hopeless, the aura of romance surrounding him took on colors deeper and more varied and intense. She had grown so pale that Mademoiselle Vernueil took to dosing her, and Thérèse accused her abruptly of having fallen in love, a thing she denied vaguely and with overtones of romantic mystery.

And then with the return to Pentlands (a return advised by her mother on account of Jack’s health) the image dimmed a little in the belief that even by the wildest flights of imagination there was no chance of her seeing him again. It became a hopeless passion; she prepared herself to forget him and, in the wisdom of her young mind, grow accustomed to the idea of marrying one of the tame young men who were so much more suitable and whom her family had always known. She had watched her admirers carefully, weighing them always against the image of the young man with red hair, dressed in the black and silver of the cuirassiers, and beside that image they had seemed to her—even the blond, good-looking Mannering boy—like little boys, rather naughty and not half so old and wise as herself. She had reconciled herself secretly and with gravity to the idea of making one of the matches common in her world—a marriage determined by property and the fact that her fiancé would be “the right sort of person.”

And so the whole affair had come to take on the color of a tragic romance, to be guarded secretly. Perhaps when she was an old woman she would tell the story to her grandchildren. She believed that whomever she married, she would be thinking always of Jean de Cyon. It was one of those half-comic illusions of youth in which there is more than a grain of melancholy truth.

And then abruptly had come the news of his visit to Brook Cottage. She still kept her secret, but not well enough to prevent her mother and Sabine from suspecting it. She had betrayed herself first on the very night of Jack’s death when she had said, with a sudden light in her eye, “It’s Jean de Cyon.... I’d forgotten he was arriving to-night.” Olivia had noticed the light because it was something which went on and on.

And at Brook Cottage young de Cyon, upset by the delay caused by the funeral and the necessity of respecting the mourning at Pentlands, had sulked and behaved in such a way that he would have been a nuisance to any one save Sabine, who found amusement in the spectacle. Used to rushing headlong toward anything he desired (as he had rushed into the French army at seventeen and off to the Argentine nine months ago), he turned ill-tempered and spent his days out of doors, rowing on the river and bathing in the solitude of the great white beach. He quarreled with Thérèse, whom he had known since she was a little girl, and tried to be as civil as possible toward the amused Sabine.

She knew by now that he had not come to Durham through any great interest in herself or Thérèse. She knew now how wise she had been (for the purposes of her plan) to have included in her invitation to him the line ... “Sybil Pentland lives on the next farm to us. You may remember her. She lunched with us last Armistice Day.”

She saw that he rather fancied himself as a man of the world who was being very clever in keeping his secret. He asked her about Sybil Pentland in a casual way that was transparently artificial, and consulted her on the lapse of time decently necessary before he broke in upon the mourning at Pentlands, and had Miss Pentland shown any admiration for the young men about Durham? If he had not been so charming and impatient he would have bored Sabine to death.

The young man was afraid of only one thing ... that perhaps she had changed in some way, that perhaps she was not in the reality as charming as she had seemed to him in the long months of his absence. He was not without experience (indeed, Sabine believed that he had gone to the Argentine to escape from some Parisian complication) and he knew that such calamitous disappointments could happen. Perhaps when he came to know her better the glamour would fade. Perhaps she did not remember him at all. But she seemed to him, after months of romantic brooding, the most desirable woman he had ever seen.

It was a new world in which he discovered himself, in some way a newer and more different world than the vast grass-covered plains from which he had just come. People about Durham, he learned, had a way of saying that Boston and Durham were like England, but this he put down quietly as a kind of snobbery, because Boston and Durham weren’t like England at all, so far as he could see; in spots Boston and Durham seemed old, but there wasn’t the same richness, the same glamour about them. They should have been romantic and yet they were not; they were more, it seemed to him, like the illustrations in a school history. They were dry ... sec, he thought, considering the French word better in this case on account of its sound.

And it wasn’t the likeness to England that he found interesting, but rather the difference ... the bleak rawness of the countryside and the sight of whole colonies of peoples as strange and foreign as the Czechs and Poles providing a sort of alien background to the whole picture.

He had gone about the business of becoming acquainted with his own country in a thorough, energetic fashion, and being a sensuous youth, filled with a taste for colors and sounds and all the emanations of the spectacle of life, he was acutely conscious of it.

To Sabine, he said, “You know the funny thing is that it seems to me like coming home. It makes me feel that I belong in America ... not in Durham, but in New York or some of those big roaring towns I’ve passed through.”

He spoke, naturally enough, not at all like an American but in the clipped English fashion, rather swallowing his words, and now and then with a faint trace of French intonation. His voice was deeper and richer than the New England voices, with their way of calling Charles Street “Challs Street” and sacred Harvard ... “Havaad.”

It was the spectacle of New York which had fascinated him more than any other because it surpassed all his dreams of it and all the descriptions people had given him of its immense force and barbaric splendor and the incredible variety of tongues and people. New York, Sabine told him with a consciousness of uttering treason, was America, far more than the sort of life he would encounter in Durham.

As he talked to Sabine of New York, he would rise to that pitch of excitement and enthusiasm which comes to people keenly alive. He even confided in her that he had left Europe never to return there to live.

“It’s old country,” he said, “and if one has been brought up there, as I’ve been, there’s no reason for going back there to live. In a way it’s a dead world ... dead surely in comparison to the Americas. And it’s the future that interests me ... not the past. I want to be where the most is going on ... in the center of things.”

When he was not playing the piano wildly, or talking to Sabine, or fussing about with Thérèse among the frogs and insects of the laboratory she had rigged up on the glass-enclosed piazza, he was walking about the garden in a state of suppressed excitement, turning over and over in his young mind his own problem and the plans he had for adjusting himself in this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of twenty-five, was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled with a reckless sense of adventure ... young men irresistible in such an old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.

To ease his impatience he sought refuge in a furious physical activity, rowing, swimming and driving with Sabine about the Durham countryside. He could not walk far, on account of the trouble caused by his old wound, but he got as far as O’Hara’s house, where he met the Irishman and they became friends. O’Hara turned over to him a canoe and a rowing-scull and told him that whenever his leg was better he might have a horse from his stables.

One morning as he pulled his canoe up the muddy bank of the river after his early exercise, he heard the sound of hoofs in the thick mud near at hand and, turning, he saw Sybil Pentland on her mare Andromache coming out of the thicket almost at his side.

It was a superb morning—cool for Durham in mid-August—and on the lazy river the nympheas spread their waxy white blossoms in starlike clusters against a carpet of green pads. It was a morning made for delights, with the long rays of the rising sun striking to silver the dew-hung spider-webs that bound together the tangled masses of wild-grape vines; and young de Cyon, standing on the edge of the path, flushed with health and the early morning exercise, his thick red hair all rumpled, was overcome swiftly by a sense of tremendous physical well-being and strength. A whole world lay before him waiting to be conquered; and into it, out of the tangled thicket, had come Sybil Pentland, more charming in the flesh than she had seemed to him even on the long starlit nights when he lay awake on the pampas thinking of her.

For a second neither of them said anything. The girl, startled and blushing a little, but touched, too, by a quiet sense of dignity, drew in her mare; and Jean, looking up at her, said in a falsely casual way (for his veins were throbbing with excitement), “Oh! Hello! You’re Miss Pentland.”

“Yes.” But she looked suddenly disappointed, as if she really believed that he had almost forgotten her.

Standing clad only in trousers and a rowing-shirt, he looked down at his costume and said, grinning, “I’m not dressed to receive visitors.”

Somehow this served to break the sense of restraint, and they fell into conversation, exchanging a few banal remarks on the beauty of the morning, and Jean, standing by Andromache, rubbing her nose with the same tenderness he had shown toward Sybil’s dogs, looked at her out of the candid blue eyes and said, “I should have come to see you sooner, only I thought you mightn’t want to see me.”

A quivering note of warmth colored his voice.

“It would have made no difference,” she said. “And now you must come often ... as often as you like. How long are you staying at Brook Cottage?”

For a second he hesitated. “A fortnight ... perhaps. Perhaps ... longer.”

And looking down at him, she thought, “I must make him stay. If I lose him again now.... I must make him stay. I like him more than any one in the world. I can’t lose him now.”

And she began to reason with herself that Fate was on her side, that destiny had delivered him again into her hands. It was like a thing ordained, and life with him would be exciting, a thrilling affair. The quiet stubbornness, come down to her from Olivia, began to rise and take possession of her. She was determined not to lose him.

They moved away up the river, still talking in a rather stiff fashion, while Jean walked beside Andromache, limping a little. One banality followed another as they groped toward each other, each proud and fearful of showing his feelings, each timid and yet eager and impatient. It was the excitement of being near to each other that made the conversation itself take on a sense of importance. Neither of them really knew what they were saying. In one sense they seemed strange and exciting to each other, but in another they were not strange at all because there lay between them that old feeling, which Sybil had recognized in the garden of the Rue de Tilsitt, that they had known each other always. There were no hesitations or doubts or suspicions.

The sky was brilliant; the scent of the mucky river and growing weeds was overwhelming. There came to both of them a quickening of the senses, a sort of heightened ecstasy, which shut out all the world. It was a kind of enchantment, but different from the enchantment which enveloped the dead house at Pentlands.

6

Each time that Olivia rose at dawn to ride out with Sybil and meet O’Hara at the old gravel-pit, the simple excursion became more glamorous to her. There was a youth in the contact with Sybil and the Irishman which she had almost forgotten, a feeling of strength for which she had long been hungering. It was, she found, a splendid way to begin the day—in the cool of the morning, riding away over the drenched grass; it made a freshening contrast to the rest of a day occupied largely by such old people as her father-in-law and Anson (who was really an old man) and the old woman in the north wing and by the persistent fluttering attacks of Aunt Cassie. And Olivia, who was not without a secret vanity, began to notice herself in the mirror ... that her eyes were brighter and her skin was more clear. She saw that she was even perhaps beautiful, and that the riding-habit became her in a romantic fashion.

She knew, too, riding across the fields between Sybil and O’Hara, that he sometimes watched her with a curious bright light in his blue eyes. He said nothing; he betrayed in no way the feeling behind all that sudden, quiet declaration on the terrace of Brook Cottage. She began to see that he was (as Sabine had discovered almost at once) a very clever and dangerous man. It was not alone because of the strange, almost physical, effect he had upon people—an effect which was almost as if his presence took possession of you completely—but because he had patience and knew how to be silent. If he had rushed in, recklessly and clumsily, everything would have been precipitated and ruined at once. There would have been a scene ending with his dismissal and Olivia, perhaps, would have been free; but he had never touched her. It was simply that he was always there, assuring her in some mysterious way that his emotions had not changed, that he still wanted her more than anything in all the world. And to a woman who was romantic by nature and had never known any romance, it was a dangerous method.

There came a morning when, waiting by the gravel-pit, O’Hara saw that there was only one rider coming toward him across the fields from Pentlands. At first it occurred to him that it must be Sybil coming alone, without her mother, and the old boredom and despair engulfed him swiftly. It was only when the rider came nearer and he saw the white star in the forehead of her horse that he knew it was Olivia herself. That she came alone, knowing what he had already told her, he took as a sign of immense importance.

This time he did not wait or ride slowly toward her. He galloped impatiently as a boy across the wet fields to meet her.

She had the old look of radiance about her and a shyness, too, that made her seem at first a trifle cool and withdrawn. She told him quietly, “Sybil didn’t come this morning. She went out very early to fish with Jean de Cyon. The mackerel are beginning to run in the open water off the marshes.”

There was an odd, strained silence and O’Hara said, “He’s a nice boy ... de Cyon.” And then, with a heroic effort to overcome the shyness which she always managed to impose upon him, he said in a low voice, “But I’m glad she didn’t come. I’ve wanted it to be like this all along.”

She did not say archly that he must not talk in this vein. It was a part of her fascination that she was too honest and intelligent not to dispense with such coquetry. He had had enough of coquetry from cheap women and had wearied of it long ago. Besides, she had wanted it “like this” herself and she knew that with O’Hara it was silly to pretend, because sooner or later he always found her out. They were not children, either of them. They both knew what they were doing, that it was a dangerous, even a reckless thing; and yet the very sense of excitement made the adventure as irresistible to the one as to the other.

For a little time they rode in silence, watching the dark hoofs of the horses as they sent up little showers of glittering dew from the knee-deep grass and clover, and presently as they turned out of the fields into the path that led into the birch woods, he laughed and said, “A penny for your thoughts.”

Smiling, she replied, “I wouldn’t sell them for millions.”

“They must be very precious.”

“Perhaps ... precious to me, and to no one else.”

“Not to any one at all....”

“No.... I don’t think they’d interest any one. They’re not too cheerful.”

At this he fell silent again, with an air of brooding and disappointment. For a time she watched him, and presently she said, “You mustn’t sulk on a morning like this.”

“I’m not sulking.... I was only ... thinking.”

She laughed. “A penny for your thoughts.”

He did not laugh. He spoke with a sudden intensity. “They, too, are worth a million ... more than that ... only I’ll share them with you. I wouldn’t share them with any one else.”

At the sound of his voice, a silly wave of happiness swept through Olivia. She thought, “I’m being young and ridiculous and enjoying myself.”

Aloud she said, “I haven’t a penny, but if you’ll trust me until to-morrow?”

And then he turned to her abruptly, the shyness gone and in its place an emotion close to irritation and anger. “Why buy them?” he asked. “You know well enough what they are. You haven’t forgotten what I told you on the terrace at Brook Cottage.... It’s grown more true every day ... all of it.” When he saw that she had become suddenly grave, he said, “And what about you?”

“You know how impossible it is.”

“Nothing is impossible ... nothing. Besides, I don’t mean the difficulties. Those will come later.... I only mean your own feelings.”

“Can’t you see that I like you?... I must like you else I wouldn’t have come alone this morning.”

“Like me,” he echoed with bitterness. “I’m not interested in having you like me!” And when she made no reply, he added, almost savagely, “Why do you keep me away from you? Why do you always put a little wall about yourself?”

“Do I?” she asked, stupidly, and with a sense of pain.

“You are cool and remote even when you laugh.”

“I don’t want to be—I hate cold people.”

For a moment she caught a quick flash of the sudden bad temper which sometimes betrayed him. “It’s because you’re so damned ladylike. Sometimes I wish you were a servant or a scrub-woman.”

“And then I wouldn’t be the same—would I?”

He looked up quickly, as if to make a sudden retort, and then, checking himself, rode on in silence. Stealing a glance at him, Olivia caught against the wall of green a swift image of the dark, stubborn tanned head—almost, she thought, like the head of a handsome bull—bent a little, thoughtfully, almost sadly; and again a faint, weak feeling attacked her—the same sensation that had overcome her on the night of her son’s death when she sat regarding the back of Anson’s head and not seeing it at all. She thought, “Why is it that this man—a stranger—seems nearer to me than Anson has ever been? Why is it that I talk to him in a way I never talked to Anson?” And a curious feeling of pity seized her at the sight of the dark head. In a quick flash of understanding she saw him as a little boy searching awkwardly for something which he did not understand; she wanted to stroke the thick, dark hair in a comforting fashion.

He was talking again. “You know nothing about me,” he was saying. “And sometimes I think you ought to know it all.” Looking at her quickly he asked, “Could you bear to hear it ... a little of it?”

She smiled at him, certain that in some mysterious, clairvoyant fashion she had penetrated the very heart of his mood, and she thought, “How sentimental I’m being ... how sickeningly sentimental!” Yet it was a rich, luxuriant mood in which her whole being relaxed and bathed itself. She thought again, “Why should I not enjoy this? I’ve been cautious all my life.”

And seeing her smile, he began to talk, telling her, as they rode toward the rising sun, the story of his humble origin and of those early bitter days along India Wharf, and from time to time she said, “I understand. My own childhood wasn’t happy,” or, “Go on, please. It fascinates me ... more than you can imagine.”

So he went on, telling her the story of the long scar on his temple, telling her as he had known he would, of his climb to success, confessing everything, even the things of which he had come to be a little ashamed, and betraying from time to time the bitterness which afflicts those who have made their own way against great odds. The shrewd, complex man became as naïve as a little boy; and she understood, as he had known she would. It was miraculous how right he had been about her.

Lost in this mood, they rode on and on as the day rose and grew warm, enveloped all the while in the odor of the dark, rich, growing thicket and the acrid smell of the tall marshferns, until Olivia, glancing at her watch, said, “It is very late. I shall have missed the family breakfast.” She meant really that Anson would have gone up to Boston by now and that she was glad—only it was impossible to say a thing like that.

At the gravel-pit, she bade him good-by, and turning her mare toward Pentlands she felt the curious effect of his nearness slipping away from her with each new step; it was as if the hot August morning were turning cold. And when she came in sight of the big red brick house sitting so solidly among the ancient elms, she thought, “I must never do this again. I have been foolish.” And again, “Why should I not do it? Why should I not be happy? They have no right to any claim upon me.”

But there was one claim, she knew; there was Sybil. She must not make a fool of herself for the sake of Sybil. She must do nothing to interfere with what had been taking place this very morning in the small fishing-boat far out beyond the marshes somewhere near the spot where Savina Pentland had been drowned. She knew well enough why Sybil had chosen to go fishing instead of riding; it was so easy to look at the girl and at young de Cyon and know what was happening there. She herself had no right to stand in the way of this other thing which was so much younger and fresher, so much more nearly perfect.

As she put her mare over the low wall by the stables she looked up and chanced to see a familiar figure in rusty black standing in the garden, as if she had been there all the while looking out over the meadows, watching them. As she drew near, Aunt Cassie came forward with an expression of anxiety on her face, saying in a thin, hushed voice, as if she might be overheard, “I thought you’d never come back, Olivia dear. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Aware from the intense air of mystery that some new calamity had occurred, Olivia replied, “I was riding with O’Hara. We went too far and it was too hot to hurry the horses.”

“I know,” said Aunt Cassie. “I saw you.” (“Of course she would,” thought Olivia. “Does anything ever escape her?”) “It’s about her. She’s been violent again this morning and Miss Egan says you may be able to do something. She keeps raving about something to do with the attic and Sabine.”

“Yes, I know what it is. I’ll go right up.”

Higgins appeared, grinning and with a bright birdlike look in his sharp eyes, as if he knew all that had been happening and wanted to say, “Ah, you were out with O’Hara this morning ... alone.... Well, you can’t do better, Ma’am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man like that.”

As he took the bridle, he said, “That’s a fine animal Mr. O’Hara rides, Ma’am. I wish we had him in our stables....”

She murmured something in reply and without even waiting for coffee hastened up the dark stairs to the north wing. On the way past the row of tall deep-set windows she caught a swift glimpse of Sabine, superbly dressed and holding a bright yellow parasol over her head, moving indolently up the long drive toward the house, and again she had a sudden unaccountable sense of something melancholy, perhaps even tragic, a little way off. It was one of those quick, inexplicable waves of depression that sweeps over one like a shadow. She said to herself, “I’m depressed now because an hour ago I was too happy.”

And immediately she thought, “But it was like Aunt Cassie to have such a thought as that. I must take care or I’ll be getting to be a true Pentland ... believing that if I’m happy a calamity is soon to follow.”

She had moments of late when it seemed to her that something in the air, some power hidden in the old house itself, was changing her slowly, imperceptibly, in spite of herself.

Miss Egan met her outside the door, with the fixed eternal smile which to-day seemed to Olivia the sort of smile that the countenance of Fate itself might wear.

“The old lady is more quiet,” she said. “Higgins helped me and we managed to bind her in the bed so that she couldn’t harm herself. It’s surprising how much strength she has in her poor thin body.” She explained that old Mrs. Pentland kept screaming, “Sabine! Sabine!” for Mrs. Callendar and that she kept insisting on being allowed to go into the attic.

“It’s the old idea that she’s lost something up there,” said Miss Egan. “But it’s probably only something she’s imagined.” Olivia was silent for a moment. “I’ll go and search,” she said. “It might be there is something and if I could find it, it would put an end to these spells.”

She found them easily, almost at once, now that there was daylight streaming in at the windows of the cavernous attic. They lay stuffed away beneath one of the great beams ... a small bundle of ancient yellowed letters which had been once tied together with a bit of mauve ribbon since torn in haste by some one who thrust them in this place of concealment. They had been opened carelessly and in haste, for the moldering paper was all cracked and torn along the edges. The ink, violet once, had turned to a dirty shade of brown.

Standing among the scattered toys left by Jack and Sybil the last time they had played house, Olivia held the letters one by one up to the light. There were eleven in all and each one was addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, at Pentlands. Eight of them had been sent through the Boston post-office and the other three bore no stamps of any kind, as if they had been sent by messengers or in a bouquet or between the leaves of a book. The handwriting was that of a man, large, impetuous, sprawling, which showed a tendency to blur the letters together in a headlong, impatient way.

She thought at once, “They are addressed to Mrs. J. Pentland, which means Mrs. Jared Pentland. Anson will be delighted, for these must be the letters which passed between Savina Pentland and her cousin, Toby Cane. Anson needed them to complete the book.”

And then it occurred to her that there was something strange about the letters—in their having been hidden and perhaps found by the old lady belowstairs and then hidden away a second time. Old Mrs. Pentland must have found them there nearly forty years ago, when they still allowed her to wander about the house. Perhaps it had been on one of those rainy days when Anson and Sabine had come into the attic to play in this very corner with these same old toys—the days when Sabine refused to pretend that muddy water was claret. And now the old lady was remembering the discovery after all these years because the return of Sabine and the sound of her name had lighted some train of long-forgotten memories.

Seating herself on a broken, battered old trunk, she opened the first of the letters reverently so as not to dislodge the bits of violet sealing-wax that still clung to the edges, and almost at once she read with a swift sense of shock:

Carissima,

I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you....

She stopped reading. She understood it now.... The scamp Toby Cane had been more than merely a cousin to Savina Pentland; he had been her lover and that was why she had hidden the letters away beneath the beams of the vast unfinished attic, intending perhaps to destroy them one day. And then she had been drowned before there was time and the letters lay in their hiding-place until John Pentland’s wife had discovered them one day by chance, only to hide them again, forgetting in the poor shocked mazes of her mind what they were or where they were hidden. They were the letters which Anson had been searching for.

But she saw at once that Anson would never use the letters in his book, for he would never bring into the open a scandal in the Pentland family, even though it was a scandal which had come to an end, tragically, nearly a century earlier and was now almost pure romance. She saw, of course, that a love affair between so radiant a creature as Savina Pentland and a scamp like Toby Cane would seem rather odd in a book called “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” Perhaps it was better not to speak of the letters at all. Anson would manage somehow to destroy all the value there was in them; he would sacrifice truth to the gods of Respectability and Pretense.

Thrusting the letters into her pocket, she descended the dark stairway, and in the north wing Miss Egan met her to ask, almost with an air of impatience, “I suppose you didn’t find anything?”

“No,” said Olivia quickly, “nothing which could possibly have interested her.”

“It’s some queer idea she’s hatched up,” replied Miss Egan, and looked at Olivia as if she doubted the truth of what she had said.

She did not go downstairs at once. Instead, she went to her own room and after bathing, seated herself in the chaise longue by the open window above the terrace, prepared to read the letters one by one. From below there arose a murmur of voices, one metallic and hard, the other nervous, thin, and high-pitched—Sabine’s and Aunt Cassie’s—as they sat on the terrace in acid conversation, each trying to outstay the other. Listening, Olivia decided that she was a little weary of them both this morning; it was the first time it had ever occurred to her that in a strange way there was a likeness between two women who seemed so different. That curious pair, who hated each other so heartily, had the same way of trying to pry into her life.

None of the letters bore any dates, so she fell to reading them in the order in which they had been found, beginning with the one which read:

Carissima,

I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you....

She read on:

It’s the thought of his being there beside you, even taking possession of you sometimes, that I can’t bear. I see him sitting there in the drawing-room, looking at you—eating you with his eyes and pretending all the while that he is above the lusts of the flesh. The flesh! The flesh! You and I, dearest, know the glories of the flesh. Sometimes I think I’m a coward not to kill him at once.

For God’s sake, get rid of him somehow to-night. I can’t pass another evening alone in the dark gloomy cottage waiting in vain. It is more than I can bear to sit there knowing that every minute, every second, may bring the sound of your step. Be merciful to me. Get rid of him somehow.

I have not touched a drop of anything since I last saw you. Are you satisfied with that?

I am sending this in a book by black Hannah. She will wait for an answer.

Slowly, as she read on and on through the mazes of the impetuous, passionate writing, the voices from the terrace below, the one raised now and a little angry, the other still metallic, hard and indifferent, grew more and more distant until presently she did not hear them at all and in the place of the sound her senses received another impression—that of a curious physical glow, stealing slowly through her whole body. It was as if there lay in that faded brown writing a smoldering fire that had never wholly died out and would never be extinguished until the letters themselves had been burned into ashes.

Word by word, line by line, page by page, the whole tragic, passionate legend came to recreate itself, until near the end she was able to see the three principal actors in it with the reality of life, as if they had never died at all but had gone on living in this old house, perhaps in this very room where she sat ... the very room which once must have belonged to Savina Pentland.

She saw the husband, that Jared Pentland of whom no portrait existed because he would never spend money on such a luxury, as he must have been in life—a sly man, shrewd and pious and avaricious save when the strange dark passion for his wife made of him an unbalanced creature. And Savina Pentland herself was there, as she looked out of the Ingres portrait—dark, voluptuous, reckless, with her bad enticing eyes—a woman who might easily be the ruin of a man like Jared Pentland. And somehow she was able to get a clear and vivid picture of the writer of those smoldering letters—a handsome scamp of a lover, dark like his cousin Savina, and given to drinking and gambling. But most of all she was aware of that direct, unashamed and burning passion that never had its roots in this stony New England soil beyond the windows of Pentlands. A man who frankly glorified the flesh! A waster! A seducer! And yet a man capable of this magnificent fire which leaped up from the yellow pages and warmed her through and through. It occurred to her then for the first time that there was something heroic and noble and beautiful in a passion so intense. For a moment she was even seized by the feeling that reading these letters was a kind of desecration.

They revealed, too, how Jared Pentland had looked upon his beautiful wife as a fine piece of property, an investment which gave him a sensual satisfaction and also glorified his house and dinner-table. (What Sabine called the “lower middle-class sense of property.”) He must have loved her and hated her at once, in the way Higgins loved and hated the handsome red mare. He must have been proud of her and yet hated her because she possessed so completely the power of making a fool of him. The whole story moved against a background of family ... the Pentland family. There were constant references to cousins and uncles and aunts and their suspicions and interference.

“It must have begun,” thought Olivia, “even in those days.”

Out of the letters she learned that the passion had begun in Rome when Savina Pentland was sitting for her portrait by Ingres. Toby Cane had been there with her and afterwards she had gone with him to his lodgings; and when they had returned to the house at Durham (almost new then and the biggest country seat in all New England) they had met in the cottage—Brook Cottage, which still stood there within sight of Olivia’s window—Brook Cottage, which after the drowning had been bought by Sabine’s grandfather and then fallen into ruins and been restored again by the too-bright, vulgar, resplendent touch of O’Hara. It was an immensely complicated and intricate story which went back, back into the past and seemed to touch them all here in Durham.

“The roots of life at Pentlands,” thought Olivia, “go down, down into the past. There are no new branches, no young, vigorous shoots.”

She came at length to the last of the letters, which had buried in its midst the terrible revealing lines—

If you knew what delight it gives me to have you write that the child is ours beyond any doubt, that there cannot be the slightest doubt of it! The baby belongs to us ... to us alone! It has nothing to do with him. I could not bear the idea of his thinking that the child is his if it was not that it makes your position secure. The thought tortures me but I am able to bear it because it leaves you safe and above suspicion.

Slowly, thoughtfully, as if unable to believe her eyes, she reread the lines through again, and then placed her hands against her head with a gesture of feeling suddenly weak and out of her mind.

She tried to think clearly. “Savina Pentland never had but one child, so far as I know ... never but one. And that must have been Toby Cane’s child.”

There could be no doubt. It was all there, in writing. The child was the child of Toby Cane and a woman who was born Savina Dalgedo. He was not a Pentland and none of his descendants had been Pentlands ... not one.

They were not Pentlands at all save as the descendants of Savina and her lover had married among the Brahmins where Pentland blood was in every family. They were not Pentlands by blood and yet they were Pentlands beyond any question, in conduct, in point of view, in tradition. It occurred to Olivia for the first time how immense and terrible a thing was that environment, that air which held them all enchanted ... all the cloud of prejudices and traditions and prides and small anxieties. It was a world so set, so powerful, so iron-bound that it had made Pentlands of people like Anson and Aunt Cassia, even like her father-in-law. It made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at all. She saw it now as an overwhelming, terrifying power that was a part of the old house. It stood rooted in the very soil of all the landscape that spread itself beyond her windows.

And in the midst of this realization she had a swift impulse to laugh, hysterically, for the picture of Anson had come to her suddenly ... Anson pouring his whole soul into that immense glorification to be known as “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

Slowly, as the first shock melted away a little, she began to believe that the yellowed bits of paper were a sort of infernal machine, an instrument with the power of shattering a whole world. What was she to do with this thing—this curious symbol of a power that always won every struggle in one way or another, directly as in the case of Savina and her lover, or by taking its vengeance upon body or soul as it had done in the case of Aunt Cassie’s poor, prying, scheming mind? And there was, too, the dark story of Horace Pentland, and the madness of the old woman in the north wing, and even those sudden terrible bouts of drinking which made so fine a man as John Pentland into something very near to a beast.

It was as if a light of blinding clarity had been turned upon all the long procession of ancestors. She saw now that if “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” was to have any value at all as truth it must be rewritten in the light of the struggle between the forces glorified by that drunken scamp Toby Cane and this other terrible force which seemed to be all about her everywhere, pressing even herself slowly into its own mold. It was an old struggle between those who chose to find their pleasure in this world and those who looked for the vague promise of a glorified future existence.

She could see Anson writing in his book, “In the present generation (192-) there exists Cassandra Pentland Struthers (Mrs. Edward Cane Struthers), a widow who has distinguished herself by her devotion to the Episcopal Church and to charity and good works. She resides in winter in Boston and in summer at her country house near Durham on the land claimed from the wilderness by the first Pentland, distinguished founder of the American family.”

Yes, Anson would write just those words in his book. He would describe thus the old woman who sat belowstairs hoping all the while that Olivia would descend bearing the news of some new tragedy ... that virginal old woman who had ruined the whole life of her husband and kept poor half-witted Miss Peavey a prisoner for nearly thirty years.

The murmur of voices died away presently and Olivia, looking out of the window, saw that it was Aunt Cassie who had won this time. She was standing in the garden looking down the drive with that malignant expression which sometimes appeared on her face in moments when she thought herself alone. Far down the shadow-speckled drive, the figure of Sabine moved indolently away in the direction of Brook Cottage. Sabine, too, belonged in a way to the family; she had grown up enveloped in the powerful tradition which made Pentlands of people who were not Pentlands at all. Perhaps (thought Olivia) the key to Sabine’s restless, unhappy existence also lay in the same dark struggle. Perhaps if one could penetrate deeply enough in the long family history one would find there the reasons for Sabine’s hatred of this Durham world and the reasons why she had returned to a people she disliked with all the bitter, almost fanatic passion of her nature. There was in Sabine an element of cold cruelty.

At the sight of Olivia coming down the steps into the garden, Aunt Cassie turned and moved forward quickly with a look of expectancy, asking, “And how is the poor thing?”

And at Olivia’s answer, “She’s quiet now ... sleeping. It’s all passed,” the looked changed to one of disappointment.

She said, with an abysmal sigh, “Ah, she will go on forever. She’ll be alive long after I’ve gone to join dear Mr. Struthers.”

“Invalids are like that,” replied Olivia, by way of saying something. “They take such care of themselves.” And almost at once, she thought, “Here I am playing the family game, pretending that she’s not mad but only an invalid.”

She had no feeling of resentment against the busy old woman; indeed it seemed to her at times that she had almost an affection for Aunt Cassie—the sort of affection one has for an animal or a bit of furniture which has been about almost as long as one can remember. And at the moment the figure of Aunt Cassie, the distant sight of Sabine, the bright garden full of flowers ... all these things seemed to her melodramatic and unreal, for she was still living in the Pentlands of Savina and Toby Cane. It was impossible to fix her attention on Aunt Cassie and her flutterings.

The old lady was saying, “You all seem to have grown very fond of this man O’Hara.”

(What was she driving at now?) Aloud, Olivia said, “Why not? He’s agreeable, intelligent ... even distinguished in his way.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I’ve been discussing him with Sabine, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I may have been wrong about him. She thinks him a clever man with a great future.” There was a pause and she added with an air of making a casual observation, “But what about his past? I mean where does he come from.”

“I know all about it. He’s been telling me. That’s why I was late this morning.”

For a time Aunt Cassie was silent, as if weighing some deep problem. At last she said, “I was wondering about seeing too much of him. He has a bad reputation with women.... At least, so I’m told.”

Olivia laughed. “After all, Aunt Cassie, I’m a grown woman. I can look out for myself.”

“Yes.... I know.” She turned with a disarming smile of Christian sweetness. “I don’t want you to think that I’m interfering, Olivia. It’s the last thing I’d think of doing. But I was considering your own good. It’s harmless enough, I’m sure. No one would ever think otherwise, knowing you, my dear. But it’s what people will say. There was a scandal I believe about eight years ago ... a road-house scandal!” She said this with an air of great suffering, as if the words “road-house scandal” seared her lips.

“I suppose so. Most men ... politicians, I mean ... have scandals connected with their names. It’s part of the business, Aunt Cassie.”

And she kept thinking with amazement of the industry of the old lady—that she should have taken the trouble of going far back into O’Hara’s past to find some definite thing against him. She did not doubt the ultimate truth of Aunt Cassie’s insinuation. Aunt Cassie did not lie deliberately; there was always a grain of truth in her implications, though sometimes the poor grain lay buried so deeply beneath exaggerations that it was almost impossible to discover it. And a thing like that might easily be true about O’Hara. With a man like him you couldn’t expect women to play the rôle they played with a man like Anson.

“It’s only on account of what people will say,” repeated Aunt Cassie.

“I’ve almost come to the conclusion that what people say doesn’t really matter any longer....”

Aunt Cassie began suddenly to pick a bouquet from the border beside her. “Oh, it’s not you I’m worrying about, Olivia dear. But we have to consider others sometimes.... There’s Sybil and Anson, and even the very name of Pentland. There’s never been any such suspicion attached to it ... ever.”