From 28e14f1e263beb71c0f2d352832d6d943c0947bc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Alex Cabal 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 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 dullness came of it, dullness 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. 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 dullness came of it, dullness 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 meetinghouse. 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 everyone 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. 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 halfway 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. At the moment, the old lady sat halfway 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. Tonight she was dressed in a very fancy gown covered with lace and sequins and passementerie, rather in the mode which someone 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 role 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 earpiece 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.” 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, tonight … 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!” 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 role 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 weekends? 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. 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 role 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 weekends? 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. 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 goodbye 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. 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 goodbye 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. 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. 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 tonight 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.” “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.” 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. 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!” “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 tonight, 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.” 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 tonight, 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.” 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. 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.I
II
@@ -66,11 +66,11 @@
-
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.”
+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 everyone knew it.”
+“Why, she does … old Mrs. Soames. She’s taken drugs for years. I thought everyone 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.
+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.
+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.”
+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.
+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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml index b60ec73..734bebe 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml @@ -18,10 +18,10 @@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 everyone 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:
+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 everyone 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,
+“Dear Mrs. Pentland,
“You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more.
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 high road and thence through the clusters of ugly stucco bungalows inhabited by the mill-workers, on its way past the deserted meetinghouse 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. …
+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 high road and thence through the clusters of ugly stucco bungalows inhabited by the mill-workers, on its way past the deserted meetinghouse 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.
+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 pallbearers, 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.
+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 pallbearers, 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.
@@ -119,14 +119,14 @@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.)
+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.”
+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.
@@ -239,19 +239,19 @@“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. …”
+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 today 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.
+“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 someone 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.
+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,
@@ -294,13 +294,13 @@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.”
+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.”
+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.”
@@ -315,11 +315,11 @@“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.”
-It was incredible (thought Olivia) that anyone would make such a statement, incredible anywhere else in the world. She wanted to ask, “What about your brother and old Mrs. Soames?” And in view of those letters that lay locked in her dressing-table. …
+It was incredible (thought Olivia) that anyone would make such a statement, incredible anywhere else in the world. She wanted to ask, “What about your brother and old Mrs. Soames?” And in view of those letters that lay locked in her dressing-table. …
At that moment lunch was announced by Peters’ appearance in the doorway. Olivia turned to Aunt Cassie, “You’re staying, of course.”
“No, I must go. You weren’t expecting me.”
So Olivia began the ancient game, played for so many years, of pressing Aunt Cassie to stay to lunch.
-“It makes no difference,” she said, “only another plate.” And so on through a whole list of arguments that she had memorized long ago. And at last Aunt Cassie, with the air of having been pressed beyond her endurance, yielded, and to Peters, who had also played the game for years, Olivia said, “Lay another place for Mrs. Struthers.”
+“It makes no difference,” she said, “only another plate.” And so on through a whole list of arguments that she had memorized long ago. And at last Aunt Cassie, with the air of having been pressed beyond her endurance, yielded, and to Peters, who had also played the game for years, Olivia said, “Lay another place for Mrs. Struthers.”
She had meant to stay all along. Lunching out saved both money and trouble, for Miss Peavey ate no more than a bird, at least not openly; and, besides, there were things she must find out at Pentlands, and other things which she must plan. In truth, wild horses could not have dragged her away.
As they entered the house, Aunt Cassie, carrying the bouquet she had plucked, said casually, “I met the Mannering boy on the road this morning and told him to come in tonight. I thought you wouldn’t mind. He’s very fond of Sybil, you know.”
“No, of course not,” replied Olivia. “I don’t mind. But I’m afraid Sybil isn’t very interested in him.”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml index 11a7551..4532f86 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@“It’s the invoice from the Custom House,” she said, lifting each of the five long sheets separately. “Five pages long … total value perhaps as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. … Of course there’s not even any duty to pay, as they’re all old things.”
Aunt Cassie started, as if seized by a sudden pain, and Sabine continued, “He even left provision for shipping it … all save four or five big pieces which are being held at Mentone. There are eighteen cases in all.”
She began to read the items one by one … cabinets, commodes, chairs, lusters, tables, pictures, bits of bronze, crystal and jade … all the long list of things which Horace Pentland had gathered with the loving care of a connoisseur during the long years of his exile; and in the midst of the reading, Aunt Cassie, unable any longer to control herself, interrupted, saying, “It seems to me he was an ungrateful, disgusting man. It ought to have gone to my dear brother, who supported him all these years. I don’t see why he left it all to a remote cousin like you.”
-Sabine delved again into the envelope. “Wait,” she said. “He explains that point himself … in his own will.” She opened a copy of this document and, searching for a moment, read, “To my cousin, Sabine Callendar (Mrs. Cane Callendar), of—Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France, and Newport, Rhode Island, I leave all my collections of furniture, tapestries, bibelots, etc., in gratitude for her kindness to me over a period of many years and in return for her faith and understanding at a time when the rest of my family treated me as an outcast.”
+Sabine delved again into the envelope. “Wait,” she said. “He explains that point himself … in his own will.” She opened a copy of this document and, searching for a moment, read, “To my cousin, Sabine Callendar (Mrs. Cane Callendar), of—Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France, and Newport, Rhode Island, I leave all my collections of furniture, tapestries, bibelots, etc., in gratitude for her kindness to me over a period of many years and in return for her faith and understanding at a time when the rest of my family treated me as an outcast.”
Aunt Cassie was beside herself. “And how should he have been treated if not as an outcast? He was an ungrateful, horrible wretch! It was Pentland money which supported him all his miserable life.” She paused a moment for breath. “I always told my dear brother that twenty-five hundred a year was far more than Horace Pentland needed. And that is how he has spent it, to insult the very people who were kind to him.”
Sabine put the papers back in the envelope and, looking up, said in her hard, metallic voice: “Money’s not everything, as I told you once before, Aunt Cassie. I’ve always said that the trouble with the Pentlands … with most of Boston, for that matter … lies in the fact that they were lower middle-class shopkeepers to begin with and they’ve never lost any of the lower middle-class virtues … especially about money. They’ve been proud of living off the income of their incomes. … No, it wasn’t money that Horace Pentland wanted. It was a little decency and kindness and intelligence. I fancy you got your money’s worth out of the poor twenty-five hundred dollars you sent him every year. It was worth a great deal more than that to keep the truth under a bushel.”
A long and painful silence followed this speech and Olivia, turning toward Sabine, tried to reproach her with a glance for speaking thus to the old lady. Aunt Cassie was being put to rout so pitifully, not only by Sabine, but by Horace Pentland, who had taken his vengeance shrewdly, long after he was dead, by striking at the Pentland sense of possessions, of property.
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@The old relentless, cruel smile lighted Sabine’s face. “No, now that the time has come she hasn’t much faith in the Heaven she’s preached all her life.” There was a brief silence and Sabine added grimly, “She will certainly be a nuisance to Saint Peter.”
But there was only sadness in Olivia’s dark eyes, because she kept thinking what a shallow, futile life Aunt Cassie’s had been. She had turned her back upon life from the beginning, even with the husband whom she married as a convenience. She kept thinking what a poor barren thing that life had been; how little of richness, of memories, it held, now that it was coming to an end.
Sabine was speaking again. “I know you’re thinking that I’m heartless, but you don’t know how cruel she was to me … what things she did to me as a child.” Her voice softened a little, but in pity for herself and not for Aunt Cassie. It was as if the ghost of the queer, unhappy, red-haired little girl of her childhood had come suddenly to stand there beside them where the ghost of Horace Pentland had stood a little while before. The old ghosts were crowding about once more, even there on the terrace in the hot August sunlight in the beauty of Olivia’s flowery garden.
-“She sent me into the world,” continued Sabine’s hard voice, “knowing nothing but what was false, believing—the little I believed in anything—in false gods, thinking that marriage was no more than a business contract between two young people with fortunes. She called ignorance by the name of innocence and quoted the Bible and that milk-and-water philosopher Emerson … ‘dear Mr. Emerson’ … whenever I asked her a direct, sensible question. … And all she accomplished was to give me a hunger for facts—hard, unvarnished facts—pleasant or unpleasant.”
+“She sent me into the world,” continued Sabine’s hard voice, “knowing nothing but what was false, believing—the little I believed in anything—in false gods, thinking that marriage was no more than a business contract between two young people with fortunes. She called ignorance by the name of innocence and quoted the Bible and that milk-and-water philosopher Emerson … ‘dear Mr. Emerson’ … whenever I asked her a direct, sensible question. … And all she accomplished was to give me a hunger for facts—hard, unvarnished facts—pleasant or unpleasant.”
A kind of hot passion entered the metallic voice, so that it took on an unaccustomed warmth and beauty. “You don’t know how much she is responsible for in my life. She … and all the others like her … killed my chance of happiness, of satisfaction. She cost me my husband. … What chance had I with a man who came from an older, wiser world … a world in which things were looked at squarely, and honestly as truth … a man who expected women to be women and not timid icebergs? No, I don’t think I shall ever forgive her.” She paused for a moment, thoughtfully, and then added, “And whatever she did, whatever cruelties she practised, whatever nonsense she preached, was always done in the name of duty and always ‘for your own good, my dear.’ ”
Then abruptly, with a bitter smile, her whole manner changed and took on once more the old air of indolent, almost despairing, boredom. “I couldn’t begin to tell you all, my dear. … It goes back too far. We’re all rotten here … not so much rotten as desiccated, for there was never much blood in us to rot. … The roots go deep. … But I shan’t bore you again with all this, I promise.”
Olivia, listening, wanted to say, “You don’t know how much blood there is in the Pentlands. … You don’t know that they aren’t Pentlands at all, but the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane. … But even that hasn’t mattered. … The very air, the very earth of New England, has changed them, dried them up.”
@@ -113,13 +113,13 @@He resented O’Hara because he knew perhaps that the Irishman regarded him and his world with cynicism; and it was O’Hara and Irishmen like him—Democrats (thought Anson) and therefore the scum of the earth—who had broken down the perfect, chilled, set model of Boston life. Sabine he hated for the same reasons; and from the very beginning he had taken a dislike to “that young de Cyon” because the young man seemed to stand entirely alone, independent of such dignities, without sign even of respect for them. And he was, too, inextricably allied with O’Hara and Sabine and the “outlandish Thérèse.”
Olivia suspected that he grew shrill and hysterical only at times when he was tormented by a suspicion of their mockery. It was then that he became unaccountable for what he said and did … unaccountable as he had been on that night after the ball. She understood that each day made him more acutely sensitive of his dignity, for he was beginning to interpret the smallest hint as an attack upon it.
Knowing these things, she had come to treat him always as a child, humoring and wheedling him until in the end she achieved what she desired, painlessly and surely. She treated him thus in the matter of refurnishing the house. Knowing that he was absorbed in finishing the final chapters of The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, she suggested that he move his table into the distant “writing-room” where he would be less disturbed by family activities; and Anson, believing that at last his wife was impressed by the importance and dignity of his work, considered the suggestion an excellent one. He even smiled and thanked her.
-Then, after having consulted old John Pentland and finding that he approved the plan, she began bit by bit to insinuate the furniture of Horace Pentland into the house. Sabine came daily to watch the progress of the change, to comment and admire and suggest changes. They found an odd excitement in the emergence of one beautiful object after another from its chrysalis of emballage; out of old rags and shavings there appeared the most exquisite of tables and cabinets, bits of chinoiserie, old books and engravings. One by one the ugly desk used by Mr. Lowell, the monstrous lamp presented by Mr. Longfellow, the anemic watercolors of Miss Maria Pentland … all the furnishings of the museum were moved into the vast old attic; until at length a new drawing-room emerged, resplendent and beautiful, civilized and warm and even a little exotic, dressed in all the treasures which Horace Pentland had spent his life in gathering with passionate care. Quietly and almost without its being noticed, the family skeleton took possession of the house, transforming its whole character.
-The change produced in Aunt Cassie a variety of confused and conflicting emotions. It seemed sacrilege to her that the worn, familiar, homely souvenirs of her father’s “dear friends” should be relegated into the background, especially by the hand of Horace Pentland; yet it was impossible for her to overlook the actual value of the collection. She saw the objects less as things of rare beauty than in terms of dollars and cents. And, as she had said, “Pentland things ought to find a place in a Pentland house.” She suspected Sabine of Machiavellian tactics and could not make up her mind whether Sabine and Horace Pentland had not triumphed in the end over herself and “dear Mr. Lowell” and “good, kind Mr. Longfellow.”
+Then, after having consulted old John Pentland and finding that he approved the plan, she began bit by bit to insinuate the furniture of Horace Pentland into the house. Sabine came daily to watch the progress of the change, to comment and admire and suggest changes. They found an odd excitement in the emergence of one beautiful object after another from its chrysalis of emballage; out of old rags and shavings there appeared the most exquisite of tables and cabinets, bits of chinoiserie, old books and engravings. One by one the ugly desk used by Mr. Lowell, the monstrous lamp presented by Mr. Longfellow, the anemic watercolors of Miss Maria Pentland … all the furnishings of the museum were moved into the vast old attic; until at length a new drawing-room emerged, resplendent and beautiful, civilized and warm and even a little exotic, dressed in all the treasures which Horace Pentland had spent his life in gathering with passionate care. Quietly and almost without its being noticed, the family skeleton took possession of the house, transforming its whole character.
+The change produced in Aunt Cassie a variety of confused and conflicting emotions. It seemed sacrilege to her that the worn, familiar, homely souvenirs of her father’s “dear friends” should be relegated into the background, especially by the hand of Horace Pentland; yet it was impossible for her to overlook the actual value of the collection. She saw the objects less as things of rare beauty than in terms of dollars and cents. And, as she had said, “Pentland things ought to find a place in a Pentland house.” She suspected Sabine of Machiavellian tactics and could not make up her mind whether Sabine and Horace Pentland had not triumphed in the end over herself and “dear Mr. Lowell” and “good, kind Mr. Longfellow.”
Anson, strangely enough, liked the change, with reservations. For a long time he had been conscious of the fact that the drawing-room and much of the rest of the house seemed shabby and worn, and so, unworthy of such dignity as attached to the Pentland name.
He stood in the doorway of the drawing-room, surveying the transformation, and remarked, “The effect seems good … a little flamboyant, perhaps, and undignified for such a house, but on the whole … good … quite good. I myself rather prefer the plain early American furniture. …”
To which Sabine replied abruptly, “But it makes hard sitting.”
Until now there had never been any music at Pentlands, for music was regarded in the family as something you listened to in concert-halls, dressed in your best clothes. Aunt Cassie, with Miss Peavey, had gone regularly for years each Friday afternoon, to sit hatless with a scarf over her head in Symphony Hall listening to “dear Colonel Higginson’s orchestra” (which had fallen off so sadly since his death), but she had never learned to distinguish one melody from another. … Music at Pentlands had always been a cultural duty, an exercise something akin to attending church. It made no more impression on Aunt Cassie than those occasional trips to Europe when, taking her own world with her, she stayed always at hotels where she would encounter friends from Boston and never be subjected to the strain of barbaric, unsympathetic faces and conversations.
-And now, quite suddenly, music at Pentlands became something alive and colorful and human. The tinny old square piano disappeared and in its place there was a great new one bought by Olivia out of her own money. In the evenings the house echoed to the sound of Chopin and Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, and even such barbaric newcomers as Stravinsky and Ravel. Old Mrs. Soames came, when she was well enough, to sit in the most comfortable of the Regence chairs with old John Pentland at her side, listening while the shadow of youth returned to her half-blind old eyes. The sound of Jean’s music penetrated sometimes as far as the room of the mad old woman in the north wing and into the writing-room, where it disturbed Anson working on The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
+And now, quite suddenly, music at Pentlands became something alive and colorful and human. The tinny old square piano disappeared and in its place there was a great new one bought by Olivia out of her own money. In the evenings the house echoed to the sound of Chopin and Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, and even such barbaric newcomers as Stravinsky and Ravel. Old Mrs. Soames came, when she was well enough, to sit in the most comfortable of the Regence chairs with old John Pentland at her side, listening while the shadow of youth returned to her half-blind old eyes. The sound of Jean’s music penetrated sometimes as far as the room of the mad old woman in the north wing and into the writing-room, where it disturbed Anson working on The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
And then one night, O’Hara came in after dinner, dressed in clothes cut rather too obviously along radically fashionable lines. It was the first time he had ever set foot on Pentland soil.
“I can’t desert her yet. You don’t know how it is at Pentlands. I’ve got to save her, even if I lose myself. I fancy they’ll be married before winter … even before autumn … before he leaves. And then I shall be free. I couldn’t … I couldn’t be your mistress now, Michael … with Sybil still in there at Pentlands with me. … I may be quibbling. … I may sound silly, but it does make a difference … because perhaps I’ve lived among them for too long.”
“You promise me that when she’s gone you’ll be free?”
“I promise you, Michael. … I’ve told you that I love you … that you’re the only man I’ve ever loved … even the smallest bit.”
-“Mrs. Callendar will help us. … She wants it.”
+“Mrs. Callendar will help us. … She wants it.”
“Oh, Sabine. …” She was startled. “You haven’t spoken to her? You haven’t told her anything?”
-“No. … But you don’t need to tell her such things. She has a way of knowing.” After a moment he said, “Why, even Higgins wants it. He keeps saying to me, in an offhand sort of way, as if what he said meant nothing at all, ‘Mrs. Pentland is a fine woman, sir. I’ve known her for years. Why, she’s even helped me out of scrapes. But it’s a pity she’s shut up in that mausoleum with all those dead ones. She ought to have a husband who’s a man. She’s married to a living corpse.’ ”
+“No. … But you don’t need to tell her such things. She has a way of knowing.” After a moment he said, “Why, even Higgins wants it. He keeps saying to me, in an offhand sort of way, as if what he said meant nothing at all, ‘Mrs. Pentland is a fine woman, sir. I’ve known her for years. Why, she’s even helped me out of scrapes. But it’s a pity she’s shut up in that mausoleum with all those dead ones. She ought to have a husband who’s a man. She’s married to a living corpse.’ ”
Olivia flushed. “He has no right to talk that way. …”
“If you could hear him speak, you’d know that it’s not disrespect, but because he worships you. He’d kiss the ground you walk over.” And looking down, he added, “He says it’s a pity that a thoroughbred like you is shut up at Pentlands. You mustn’t mind his way of saying it. He’s something of a horse-breeder and so he sees such things in the light of truth.”
She knew, then, what O’Hara perhaps had failed to understand—that Higgins was touching the tragedy of her son, a son who should have been strong and full of life, like Jean. And a wild idea occurred to her—that she might still have a strong son, with O’Hara as the father, a son who would be a Pentland heir but without the Pentland taint. She might do what Savina Pentland had done. But she saw at once how absurd such an idea was; Anson would know well enough that it was not his son.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml index eb4c0de..c283355 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@And so the depression of another illness came to add its weight to the burden of Jack’s death and the grief of John Pentland. The task of battling the cloud of melancholy which hung over the old house grew more and more heavy upon Olivia’s shoulders. Anson remained as usual indifferent to any changes in the life about him, living really in the past among all the sheaves of musty papers, a man not so much cold-blooded as bloodless, for there was nothing active nor calculating in his nature, but only a great inertia, a lack of all fire. And it was impossible to turn to Sabine, who in an odd way seemed as cold and detached as Anson; she appeared to stand at a little distance, waiting, watching them all, even Olivia herself. And it was of course unthinkable to cloud the happiness of Sybil by going to her for support.
There was at least O’Hara, who came more and more frequently to Pentlands, now that the first visit had been made and the ice was broken. Anson encountered him once in the hallway, coldly; and he had become very friendly with old John Pentland. The two had a common interest in horses and dogs and cattle, and O’Hara, born in the Boston slums and knowing very little on any of these subjects, perhaps found the old gentleman a valuable source of information. He told Olivia, “I wouldn’t come to the house except for you. I can’t bear to think of you there … always alone … always troubled.”
And in the evenings, while they played bridge or listened to Jean’s music, she sometimes caught his eye, watching her with the old admiration, telling her that he was ready to support her no matter what happened.
-A week after the encounter with Miss Peavey at the catnip-bed, Peters came to Olivia’s room late in the afternoon to say, with a curious blend of respect and confidence, “He’s ill again, Mrs. Pentland.”
+A week after the encounter with Miss Peavey at the catnip-bed, Peters came to Olivia’s room late in the afternoon to say, with a curious blend of respect and confidence, “He’s ill again, Mrs. Pentland.”
She knew what Peters meant; it was a kind of code between them. … The same words used so many times before.
She went quickly to the tall narrow library that smelled of dogs and apples and woodsmoke, knowing well enough what she would find there; and on opening the door she saw him at once, lying asleep in the big leather chair. The faint odor of whisky—a smell which had come long since to fill her always with a kind of horror—hung in the air, and on the mahogany desk stood three bottles, each nearly emptied. He slept quietly, one arm flung across his chest, the other hanging to the floor, where the bony fingers rested limply against the Turkey-red carpet. There was something childlike in the peace which enveloped him. It seemed to Olivia that he was even free now of the troubles which long ago had left their mark in the harsh, bitter lines of the old face. The lines were gone, melted away somehow, drowned in the immense quiet of this artificial death. It was only thus, perhaps, that he slept quietly, untroubled by dreams. It was only thus that he ever escaped.
Standing in the doorway she watched him for a time, quietly, and then, turning, she said to Peters, “Will you tell Higgins?” and entering the door she closed the red-plush curtains, shutting out the late afternoon sunlight.
@@ -67,9 +67,9 @@“Because,” he added, looking away from her once more, “because I owe her that … even after I’m dead. I couldn’t rest if she were shut up somewhere … among strangers. You see … once … once. …” He broke off sharply, as if what he had been about to say was unbearable.
With Olivia the sense of uneasiness changed into actual terror. She wanted to cry out, “Stop! … Don’t go on!” But some instinct told her that he meant to go on and on to the very end, painfully, despite anything she could do.
“It’s odd,” he was saying quite calmly, “but there seem to be only women left … no men … for Anson is really an old woman.”
-Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind of machine, he went on, “And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we needn’t think of him any longer. … But there’s Mrs. Soames. …” He coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great agony. “There’s Mrs. Soames,” he repeated. “I know that you understand about her, Olivia … and I’m grateful to you for having been kind and human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we’ve given Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty years … but I don’t care about that. They’ve watched us … they’ve known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house … the very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world, Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my dear. They watch you … they see everything you do. They almost know what you think … and when they don’t know, they make it up. That’s one of the signs of a sick, decaying world … that they get their living vicariously … by watching someone else live … that they live always in the past. That’s the only reason I ever felt sorry for Horace Pentland … the only reason that I had sympathy for him. It was cruel that he should have been born in such a place.”
+Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind of machine, he went on, “And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we needn’t think of him any longer. … But there’s Mrs. Soames. …” He coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great agony. “There’s Mrs. Soames,” he repeated. “I know that you understand about her, Olivia … and I’m grateful to you for having been kind and human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we’ve given Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty years … but I don’t care about that. They’ve watched us … they’ve known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house … the very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world, Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my dear. They watch you … they see everything you do. They almost know what you think … and when they don’t know, they make it up. That’s one of the signs of a sick, decaying world … that they get their living vicariously … by watching someone else live … that they live always in the past. That’s the only reason I ever felt sorry for Horace Pentland … the only reason that I had sympathy for him. It was cruel that he should have been born in such a place.”
The bitterness ran like acid through all the speech, through the very timbre of his voice. It burned in the fierce black eyes where the fire was not yet dead. Olivia believed that she was seeing him now for the first time, in his fullness, with nothing concealed. And as she listened, the old cloud of mystery that had always hidden him from her began to clear away like the fog lifting from the marshes in the early morning. She saw him now as he really was … a man fiercely masculine, bitter, clearheaded, and more human than the rest of them, who had never before betrayed himself even for an instant.
-“But about Mrs. Soames. … If anything should happen to me, Olivia … if I should die first, I want you to be kind to her … for my sake and for hers. She’s been patient and good to me for so long.” The bitterness seemed to flow away a little now, leaving only a kindling warmth in its place. “She’s been good to me. … She’s always understood, Olivia, even before you came here to help me. You and she, Olivia, have made life worth living for me. She’s been patient … more patient than you know. Sometimes I must have made life for her a hell on earth … but she’s always been there, waiting, full of gentleness and sympathy. She’s been ill most of the time you’ve known her … old and ill. You can’t imagine how beautiful she once was.”
+“But about Mrs. Soames. … If anything should happen to me, Olivia … if I should die first, I want you to be kind to her … for my sake and for hers. She’s been patient and good to me for so long.” The bitterness seemed to flow away a little now, leaving only a kindling warmth in its place. “She’s been good to me. … She’s always understood, Olivia, even before you came here to help me. You and she, Olivia, have made life worth living for me. She’s been patient … more patient than you know. Sometimes I must have made life for her a hell on earth … but she’s always been there, waiting, full of gentleness and sympathy. She’s been ill most of the time you’ve known her … old and ill. You can’t imagine how beautiful she once was.”
“I know,” said Olivia softly. “I remember seeing her when I first came to Pentlands … and Sabine has told me.”
The name of Sabine appeared to rouse him suddenly. He sat up very straight and said, “Don’t trust Sabine too far, Olivia. She belongs to us, after all. She’s very like my sister Cassie … more like her than you can imagine. It’s why they hate each other so. She’s Cassie turned inside out, as you might say. They’d both sacrifice everything for the sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them. They live … vicariously.”
Olivia would have interrupted him, defending Sabine and telling of the one real thing that had happened to her … the tragic love for her husband; she would have told him of all the abrupt, incoherent confidences Sabine had made her; but the old man gave her no chance. It seemed suddenly that he had become possessed, fiercely intent upon pouring out to her all the dark things he had kept hidden for so long.
@@ -97,10 +97,10 @@He poured out a full glass and seated himself once more, drinking the stuff slowly while he talked.
“So we were married, I thinking that I was in love with her, because I knew nothing of such things … nothing. It wasn’t really love, you see. … Olivia, I’m going to tell you the truth … everything … all of the truth. It wasn’t really love, you see. It was only that she was the only woman I had ever approached in that way … and I was a strong, healthy young man.”
He began to speak more and more slowly, as if each word were thrust out by an immense effort of will. “And she knew nothing … nothing at all. She was,” he said bitterly, “all that a young woman was supposed to be. After the first night of the honeymoon, she was never quite the same again … never quite the same, Olivia. Do you know what that means? The honeymoon ended in a kind of madness, a fixed obsession. She’d been brought up to think of such things with a sacred horror and there was a touch of madness in her family. She was never the same again,” he repeated in a melancholy voice, “and when Anson was born she went quite out of her head. She would not see me or speak to me. She fancied that I had disgraced her forever … and after that she could never be left alone without someone to watch her. She never went out again in the world. …”
-The voice died away into a hoarse whisper. The glass of whisky had been emptied in a supreme effort to break through the shell which had closed him in from all the world, from Olivia, whom he cherished, perhaps even from Mrs. Soames, whom he had loved. In the distance the music still continued, this time as an accompaniment to the hard, loud voice of Thérèse singing, “I’m in Love Again and the Spring Is A-Comin’.” … Thérèse, the dark, cynical, invincible Thérèse for whom life, from frogs to men, held very few secrets.
-“But the story doesn’t end there,” continued John Pentland weakly. “It goes on … because I came to know what being in love might be when I met Mrs. Soames. … Only then,” he said sadly, as if he saw the tragedy from far off as a thing which had little to do with him. “Only then,” he repeated, “it was too late. After what I had done to her, it was too late to fall in love. I couldn’t abandon her. It was impossible. It ought never to have happened.” He straightened his tough old body and added, “I’ve told you all this, Olivia, because I wanted you to understand why sometimes I am …” He paused for a moment and then plunged ahead, “why I am a beast as I was yesterday. There have been times when it was the only way I could go on living. … And it harmed no one. There aren’t many who ever knew about it. … I always hid myself. There was never any spectacle.”
+The voice died away into a hoarse whisper. The glass of whisky had been emptied in a supreme effort to break through the shell which had closed him in from all the world, from Olivia, whom he cherished, perhaps even from Mrs. Soames, whom he had loved. In the distance the music still continued, this time as an accompaniment to the hard, loud voice of Thérèse singing, “I’m in Love Again and the Spring Is A-Comin’.” … Thérèse, the dark, cynical, invincible Thérèse for whom life, from frogs to men, held very few secrets.
+“But the story doesn’t end there,” continued John Pentland weakly. “It goes on … because I came to know what being in love might be when I met Mrs. Soames. … Only then,” he said sadly, as if he saw the tragedy from far off as a thing which had little to do with him. “Only then,” he repeated, “it was too late. After what I had done to her, it was too late to fall in love. I couldn’t abandon her. It was impossible. It ought never to have happened.” He straightened his tough old body and added, “I’ve told you all this, Olivia, because I wanted you to understand why sometimes I am …” He paused for a moment and then plunged ahead, “why I am a beast as I was yesterday. There have been times when it was the only way I could go on living. … And it harmed no one. There aren’t many who ever knew about it. … I always hid myself. There was never any spectacle.”
Slowly Olivia’s white hand stole across the polished surface of the desk and touched the brown, bony one that lay there now, quietly, like a hawk come to rest. She said nothing and yet the simple gesture carried an eloquence of which no words were capable. It brought tears into the burning eyes for the second time in the life of John Pentland. He had wept only once before … on the night of his grandson’s death. And they were not, Olivia knew, tears of self-pity, for there was no self-pity in the tough, rugged old body; they were tears at the spectacle of a tragedy in which he happened by accident to be concerned.
-“I wanted you to know, my dear Olivia … that I have never been unfaithful to her, not once in all the years since our wedding-night. … I know the world will never believe it, but I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me … and she knows that it is true.”
+“I wanted you to know, my dear Olivia … that I have never been unfaithful to her, not once in all the years since our wedding-night. … I know the world will never believe it, but I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me … and she knows that it is true.”
And now that she knew the story was finished, she did not go away, because she knew that he wanted her to stay, sitting there beside him in silence, touching his hand. He was the sort of man—a man, she thought, like Michael—who needed women about him.
After a long time, he turned suddenly and asked, “This boy of Sybil’s—who is he? What is he like?”
“Sabine knows about him.”
@@ -126,13 +126,13 @@She did not go to her own room, because it would have been impossible to sleep, and she could not go to the drawing-room to face, in the mood which held her captive, such young faces as those of Jean and Thérèse and Sybil. At the moment she could not bear the thought of any enclosed place, of a room or even a place covered by a roof which shut out the open sky. She had need of the air and that healing sense of freedom and oblivion which the sight of the marshes and the sea sometimes brought to her. She wanted to breathe deeply the fresh salty atmosphere, to run, to escape somewhere. Indeed, for a moment she succumbed to a sense of panic, as she had done on the other hot night when O’Hara followed her into the garden.
She went out across the terrace and, wandering aimlessly, found herself presently moving beneath the trees in the direction of the marshes and the sea. This last night of August was hot and clear save for the faint, blue-white mist that always hung above the lower meadows. There had been times in the past when the thought of crossing the lonely meadows, of wandering the shadowed lanes in the darkness, had frightened her, but tonight such an adventure seemed only restful and quiet, perhaps because she believed that she could encounter there nothing more terrible than the confidences of John Pentland. She was acutely aware, as she had been on that other evening, of the breathless beauty of the night, of the velvety shadows along the hedges and ditches, of the brilliance of the stars, of the distant foaming white line of the sea and the rich, fertile odor of the pastures and marshes.
And presently, when she had grown a little more calm, she tried to bring some order out of the chaos that filled her body and spirit. It seemed to her that all life had become hopelessly muddled and confused. She was aware in some way, almost without knowing why, that the old man had tricked her, turning her will easily to his own desires, changing all the prospect of the future. She had known always that he was strong and in his way invincible, but until tonight she had never known the full greatness of his strength … how relentless, even how unscrupulous he could be; for he had been unscrupulous, unfair, in the way he had used every weapon at hand … every sentiment, every memory … to achieve his will. There had been no fierce struggle in the open; it was far more subtle than that. He had subdued her without her knowing it, aided perhaps by all that dark force which had the power of changing them all … even the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane into “Pentlands.”
-Thinking bitterly of what had passed, she came to see that his strength rested upon the foundation of his virtue, his rightness. One could say—indeed, one could believe it as one believed that the sun had risen yesterday—that all his life had been tragically foolish and quixotic, fantastically devoted to the hard, uncompromising ideal of what a Pentland ought to be; and yet … yet one knew that he had been right, even perhaps heroic; one respected his uncompromising strength. He had made a wreck of his own happiness and driven poor old Mrs. Soames to seek peace in the Nirvana of drugs; and yet for her, he was the whole of life: she lived only for him. This code of his was hard, cruel, inhuman, sacrificing everything to its observance. … “Even,” thought Olivia, “to sacrificing me along with himself. But I will not be sacrificed. I will escape!”
+Thinking bitterly of what had passed, she came to see that his strength rested upon the foundation of his virtue, his rightness. One could say—indeed, one could believe it as one believed that the sun had risen yesterday—that all his life had been tragically foolish and quixotic, fantastically devoted to the hard, uncompromising ideal of what a Pentland ought to be; and yet … yet one knew that he had been right, even perhaps heroic; one respected his uncompromising strength. He had made a wreck of his own happiness and driven poor old Mrs. Soames to seek peace in the Nirvana of drugs; and yet for her, he was the whole of life: she lived only for him. This code of his was hard, cruel, inhuman, sacrificing everything to its observance. … “Even,” thought Olivia, “to sacrificing me along with himself. But I will not be sacrificed. I will escape!”
And after a long time she began to see slowly what it was that lay at the bottom of the iron power he had over people, the strength which none of them had been able to resist. It was a simple thing … simply that he believed, passionately, relentlessly, as those first Puritans had done.
The others all about her did not matter. Not one of them had any power over her … not Anson, nor Aunt Cassie, nor Sabine, nor Bishop Smallwood. None of them played any part in the course of her life. They did not matter. She had no fear of them; rather they seemed to her now fussy and pitiful.
But John Pentland believed. It was that which made the difference.
Stumbling along half-blindly, she found herself presently at the bridge where the lane from Pentlands crossed the river on its way to Brook Cottage. Since she had been a little girl the sight of water had exerted a strange spell upon her … the sight of a river, a lake, but most of all the open sea; she had always been drawn toward these things like a bit of iron toward a magnet; and now, finding herself at the bridge, she halted, and stood looking over the stone parapet in the shadow of the hawthorn-bushes that grew close to the water’s edge, down on the dark, still pool below her. The water was black and in it the bright little stars glittered like diamonds scattered over its surface. The warm, rich odor of cattle filled the air, touched by the faint, ghostly perfume of the last white nympheas that bordered the pool.
-And while she stood there, bathed in the stillness of the dark solitude, she began to understand a little what had really passed between them in the room smelling of whisky and saddle-soap. She saw how the whole tragedy of John Pentland and his life had been born of the stupidity, the ignorance, the hypocrisy of others, and she saw, too, that he was beyond all doubt the grandson of the Toby Cane who had written those wild passionate letters glorifying the flesh; only John Pentland had found himself caught in the prison of that other terrible thing—the code in which he had been trained, in which he believed. She saw now that it was not strange that he sought escape from reality by shutting himself in and drinking himself into a stupor. He had been caught, tragically, between those two powerful forces. He thought himself a Pentland and all the while there burned in him the fire that lay in Toby Cane’s letters and in the wanton look that was fixed forever in the portrait of Savina Pentland. She kept seeing him as he said, “I have never been unfaithful to her, not once in all the years since our wedding-night. … I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me … and she knows that it is true.”
+And while she stood there, bathed in the stillness of the dark solitude, she began to understand a little what had really passed between them in the room smelling of whisky and saddle-soap. She saw how the whole tragedy of John Pentland and his life had been born of the stupidity, the ignorance, the hypocrisy of others, and she saw, too, that he was beyond all doubt the grandson of the Toby Cane who had written those wild passionate letters glorifying the flesh; only John Pentland had found himself caught in the prison of that other terrible thing—the code in which he had been trained, in which he believed. She saw now that it was not strange that he sought escape from reality by shutting himself in and drinking himself into a stupor. He had been caught, tragically, between those two powerful forces. He thought himself a Pentland and all the while there burned in him the fire that lay in Toby Cane’s letters and in the wanton look that was fixed forever in the portrait of Savina Pentland. She kept seeing him as he said, “I have never been unfaithful to her, not once in all the years since our wedding-night. … I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me … and she knows that it is true.”
It seemed to her that this fidelity was a terrible, a wicked, thing.
And she came to understand that through all their talk together, the thought, the idea, of Michael had been always present. It was almost as if they had been speaking all the while about Michael and herself. A dozen times the old man had touched upon it, vaguely but surely. She had no doubts that Aunt Cassie had long since learned all there was to learn from Miss Peavey of the encounter by the catnip-bed, and she was certain that she had taken the information to her brother. Still, there was nothing definite in anything Miss Peavey had seen, very little that was even suspicious. And yet, as she looked back upon her talk with the old man, it seemed to her that in a dozen ways, by words, by intonation, by glances, he had implied that he knew the secret. Even in the end when, cruelly, he had with an uncanny sureness touched the one fear, the one suspicion that marred her love for Michael, by saying in the most casual way, “Still, I think we’d better be careful of him. He’s a clever Irishman on the make … and such gentlemen need watching. They’re usually thinking only of themselves.”
And then the most fantastic of all thoughts occurred to her … that all their talk together, even the painful, tragic confidence made with such an heroic effort, was directed at herself. He had done all this—he had emerged from his shell of reticence, he had humiliated his fierce pride—all to force her to give up Michael, to force her to sacrifice herself on the altar of that fantastic ideal in which he believed.
@@ -146,7 +146,7 @@In the midst of this rebellion, she became aware, with that strange acuteness which seemed to touch all her senses, that she was no longer alone on the bridge in the midst of empty, mist-veiled meadows. She knew suddenly and with a curious certainty that there were others somewhere near her in the darkness, perhaps watching her, and she had for a moment a wave of the quick, chilling fear which sometimes overtook her at Pentlands at the times when she had a sense of figures surrounding her who could neither be seen nor touched. And almost at once she distinguished, emerging from the mist that blanketed the meadows, the figures of two people, a man and a woman, walking very close to each other, their arms entwined. For a moment she thought, “Am I really mad? Am I seeing ghosts in reality?” The fantastic idea occurred to her that the two figures were perhaps Savina Pentland and Toby Cane risen from their lost grave in the sea to wander across the meadows and marshes of Pentland. Moving through the drifting, starlit mist, they seemed vague and indistinct and watery, like creatures come up out of the water. She fancied them, all dripping and wet, emerging from the waves and crossing the white rim of beach on their way toward the big old house. …
The sight, strangely enough, filled her with no sense of horror, but only with fascination.
And then, as they drew nearer, she recognized the man—something at first vaguely familiar in the cocky, strutting walk. She knew the bandy legs and was filled suddenly with a desire to laugh wildly and hysterically. It was only the rabbitlike Higgins engaged in some new conquest. Quietly she stepped farther into the shadow of the hawthorns and the pair passed her, so closely that she might have reached out her hand and touched them. It was only then that she recognized the woman. It was no Polish girl from the village, this time. It was Miss Egan—the starched, the efficient Miss Egan, whom Higgins had seduced. She was leaning on him as they walked—a strange, broken, feminine Miss Egan whom Olivia had never seen before.
-At once she thought, “Old Mrs. Pentland has been left alone. Anything might happen. I must hurry back to the house.” And she had a quick burst of anger at the deceit of the nurse, followed by a flash of intuition which seemed to clarify all that had been happening since the hot night early in the summer when she had seen Higgins leaping the wall like a goat to escape the glare of the motor-lights. The mysterious woman who had disappeared over the wall that night was Miss Egan. She had been leaving the old woman alone night after night since then; it explained the sudden impatience and bad temper of these last two days when Higgins had been shut up with the old man.
+At once she thought, “Old Mrs. Pentland has been left alone. Anything might happen. I must hurry back to the house.” And she had a quick burst of anger at the deceit of the nurse, followed by a flash of intuition which seemed to clarify all that had been happening since the hot night early in the summer when she had seen Higgins leaping the wall like a goat to escape the glare of the motor-lights. The mysterious woman who had disappeared over the wall that night was Miss Egan. She had been leaving the old woman alone night after night since then; it explained the sudden impatience and bad temper of these last two days when Higgins had been shut up with the old man.
She saw it all now—all that had happened in the past two months—in an orderly procession of events. The old woman had escaped, leading the way to Savina Pentland’s letters, because Miss Egan had deserted her post to wander across the meadows at the call of that mysterious, powerful force which seemed to take possession of the countryside at nightfall. It was in the air again tonight, all about her … in the air, in the fields, the sound of the distant sea, the smell of cattle and of ripening seeds … as it had been on the night when Michael followed her out into the garden.
In a way, the whole chain of events was the manifestation of the disturbing force which had in the end revealed the secret of Savina’s letters. It had mocked them, and now the secret weighed on Olivia as a thing which she must tell someone, which she could no longer keep to herself. It burned her, too, with the sense of possessing a terrible and shameful weapon which she might use if pushed beyond endurance.
Slowly, after the two lovers had disappeared, she made her way back again toward the old house, which loomed square and black against the deep blue of the sky, and as she walked, her anger at Miss Egan’s betrayal of trust seemed to melt mysteriously away. She would speak to Miss Egan tomorrow, or the day after; in any case, the affair had been going on all summer and no harm had come of it—no harm save the discovery of Savina Pentland’s letters. She felt a sudden sympathy for this starched, efficient woman whom she had always disliked; she saw that Miss Egan’s life, after all, was a horrible thing—a procession of days spent in the company of a mad old woman. It was, Olivia thought, something like her own existence. …
@@ -159,7 +159,7 @@She was wakened early, after having slept badly, with the news that Michael had been kept in Boston the night before and would not be able to ride with her as usual. When the maid had gone away she grew depressed, for she had counted upon seeing him and coming to some definite plan. For a moment she even experienced a vague jealousy, which she put away at once as shameful. It was not, she told herself, that he ever neglected her; it was only that he grew more and more occupied as the autumn approached. It was not that there was any other woman involved; she felt certain of him. And yet there remained that strange, gnawing little suspicion placed in her mind when John Pentland had said, “He’s a clever Irishman on the make … and such gentlemen need watching.”
After all, she knew nothing of him save what he had chosen to tell her. He was a free man, independent, a buccaneer, who could do as he chose in life. Why should he ruin himself for her?
She rose at last, determined to ride alone, in the hope that the fresh morning air and the exercise would put to rout this cloud of morbidity which had kept possession of her from the moment she left John Pentland in the library.
-As she dressed, she thought, “Day after tomorrow I shall be forty years old. Perhaps that’s the reason why I feel tired and morbid. Perhaps I’m on the borderland of middle-age. But that can’t be. I am strong and well and I look young, despite everything. I am tired because of what happened last night.” And then it occurred to her that perhaps Mrs. Soames had known these same thoughts again and again during her long devotion to John Pentland. “No,” she told herself, “whatever happens I shall never lead the life she has led. Anything is better than that … anything.”
+As she dressed, she thought, “Day after tomorrow I shall be forty years old. Perhaps that’s the reason why I feel tired and morbid. Perhaps I’m on the borderland of middle-age. But that can’t be. I am strong and well and I look young, despite everything. I am tired because of what happened last night.” And then it occurred to her that perhaps Mrs. Soames had known these same thoughts again and again during her long devotion to John Pentland. “No,” she told herself, “whatever happens I shall never lead the life she has led. Anything is better than that … anything.”
It seemed strange to her to awaken and find that nothing was changed in all the world about her. After what had happened the night before in the library and on the dark meadows, there should have been some mark left upon the life at Pentlands. The very house, the very landscape, should have kept some record of what had happened; and yet everything was the same. She experienced a faint shock of surprise to find the sun shining brightly, to see Higgins in the stable-yard saddling her horse and whistling all the while in an excess of high spirits, to hear the distant barking of the beagles, and to see Sybil crossing the meadow toward the river to meet Jean. Everything was the same, even Higgins, whom she had mistaken for a ghost as he crossed the mist-hung meadows a few hours earlier. It was as if there were two realities at Pentlands—one, it might have been said, of the daylight and the other of the darkness; as if one life—a secret, hidden one—lay beneath the bright, pleasant surface of a world composed of green fields and trees, the sound of barking dogs, the faint odor of coffee arising from the kitchen, and the sound of a groom whistling while he saddled a thoroughbred. It was a misfortune that chance had given her an insight into both the bright, pleasant world and that other dark, nebulous one. The others, save perhaps old John Pentland, saw only this bright, easy life that had begun to stir all about her.
And she reflected that a stranger coming to Pentlands would find it a pleasant, comfortable house, where the life was easy and even luxurious, where all of them were protected by wealth. He would find them all rather pleasant, normal, friendly people of a family respected and even distinguished. He would say, “Here is a world that is solid and comfortable and sound.”
Yes, it would appear thus to a stranger, so it might be that the dark, fearful world existed only in her imagination. Perhaps she herself was ill, a little unbalanced and morbid … perhaps a little touched like the old woman in the north wing.
@@ -168,19 +168,19 @@She rode listlessly, allowing the mare to lead through the birch thicket over the cool dark paths which she and Michael always followed. The morning air did not change her spirits. There was something sad in riding alone through the long green tunnel.
When at last she came out on the opposite side by the patch of catnip where they had encountered Miss Peavey, she saw a Ford drawn up by the side of the road and a man standing beside it, smoking a cigar and regarding the engine as if he were in trouble. She saw no more than that and would have passed him without troubling to look a second time, when she heard herself being addressed.
-“You’re Mrs. Pentland, aren’t you?”
-She drew in the mare. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Pentland.”
+“You’re Mrs. Pentland, aren’t you?”
+She drew in the mare. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Pentland.”
He was a little man, dressed rather too neatly in a suit of checkered stuff, with a high, stiff white collar which appeared to be strangling him. He wore nose-glasses and his face had a look of having been highly polished. As she turned, he took off his straw hat and with a great show of manners came forward, bowing and smiling cordially.
-“Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that I’m right. I hoped I might meet you here. It’s a great pleasure to know you, Mrs. Pentland. My name is Gavin. … I’m by way of being a friend of Michael O’Hara.”
+“Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that I’m right. I hoped I might meet you here. It’s a great pleasure to know you, Mrs. Pentland. My name is Gavin. … I’m by way of being a friend of Michael O’Hara.”
“Oh!” said Olivia. “How do you do?”
“You’re not in a great hurry, I hope?” he asked. “I’d like to have a word or two with you.”
“No, I’m not in a great hurry.”
It was impossible to imagine what this fussy little man, standing in the middle of the road, bowing and smiling, could have to say to her.
-Still holding his hat in his hand, he tossed away the end of his cigar and said, “It’s about a very delicate matter, Mrs. Pentland. It has to do with Mr. O’Hara’s campaign. I suppose you know about that. You’re a friend of his, I believe?”
+Still holding his hat in his hand, he tossed away the end of his cigar and said, “It’s about a very delicate matter, Mrs. Pentland. It has to do with Mr. O’Hara’s campaign. I suppose you know about that. You’re a friend of his, I believe?”
“Why, yes,” she said coldly. “We ride together.”
He coughed and, clearly ill at ease, set off on a tangent from the main subject. “You see, I’m a great friend of his. In fact, we grew up together … lived in the same ward and fought together as boys. You mightn’t think it to see us together … because he’s such a clever one. He’s made for big things and I’m not. … I’m … I’m just plain John Gavin. But we’re friends, all the same, just the same as ever … just as if he wasn’t a big man. That’s one thing about Michael. He never goes back on his old friends, no matter how great he gets to be.”
A light of adoration shone in the blue eyes of the little man. It was, Olivia thought, as if he were speaking of God; only clearly he thought of Michael O’Hara as greater than God. If Michael affected men like this, it was easy to see why he was so successful.
-The little man kept interrupting himself with apologies. “I shan’t keep you long, Mrs. Pentland … only a moment. You see I thought it was better if I saw you here instead of coming to the house.” Suddenly screwing up his shiny face, he became intensely serious. “It’s like this, Mrs. Pentland. … I know you’re a good friend of his and you wish him well. You want to see him get elected … even though you people out here don’t hold much with the Democratic party.”
+The little man kept interrupting himself with apologies. “I shan’t keep you long, Mrs. Pentland … only a moment. You see I thought it was better if I saw you here instead of coming to the house.” Suddenly screwing up his shiny face, he became intensely serious. “It’s like this, Mrs. Pentland. … I know you’re a good friend of his and you wish him well. You want to see him get elected … even though you people out here don’t hold much with the Democratic party.”
“Yes,” said Olivia. “That’s true.”
“Well,” he continued with a visible effort, “Michael’s a good friend of mine. I’m sort of a bodyguard to him. Of course, I never come out here. I don’t belong in this world. … I’d feel sort of funny out here.”
(Olivia found herself feeling respect for the little man. He was so simple and so honest and he so obviously worshiped Michael.)
@@ -192,25 +192,25 @@“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “Yes … in the end, we’re all human … even swells like me.” There was a twinkle of humor in her eye which for a moment disconcerted the little man.
“Well,” he went on, “he’s all upset about her and he’s no good for anything. Now, what I thought was this … that you could find out who this woman is and go to her and persuade her to lay off him for a time … to go away some place … at least until the campaign is over. It’d make a difference. D’you see?”
He looked at her boldly, as if what he had been saying was absolutely honest and direct, as if he really had not the faintest idea who this woman was, and beneath a sense of anger, Olivia was amused at the crude tact which had evolved this trick.
-“There’s not much that I can do,” she said. “It’s a preposterous idea … but I’ll do what I can. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything. It lies with Mr. O’Hara, after all.”
-“You see, Mrs. Pentland, if it ever got to be a scandal, it’d be the end of him. A woman out of the ward doesn’t matter so much, but a woman out here would be different. She’d get a lot of publicity from the sassiety editors and all. … That’s what’s dangerous. He’d have the whole church against him on the grounds of immorality.”
+“There’s not much that I can do,” she said. “It’s a preposterous idea … but I’ll do what I can. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything. It lies with Mr. O’Hara, after all.”
+“You see, Mrs. Pentland, if it ever got to be a scandal, it’d be the end of him. A woman out of the ward doesn’t matter so much, but a woman out here would be different. She’d get a lot of publicity from the sassiety editors and all. … That’s what’s dangerous. He’d have the whole church against him on the grounds of immorality.”
While he was speaking, a strange idea occurred to Olivia—that much of what he said sounded like a strange echo of Aunt Cassie’s methods of argument.
-The horse had grown impatient and was pawing the road and tossing his head; and Olivia was angry now, genuinely angry, so that she waited for a time before speaking, lest she should betray herself and spoil all this little game of pretense which Mr. Gavin had built up to keep himself in countenance. At last she said, “I’ll do what I can, but it’s a ridiculous thing you’re asking of me.”
+The horse had grown impatient and was pawing the road and tossing his head; and Olivia was angry now, genuinely angry, so that she waited for a time before speaking, lest she should betray herself and spoil all this little game of pretense which Mr. Gavin had built up to keep himself in countenance. At last she said, “I’ll do what I can, but it’s a ridiculous thing you’re asking of me.”
The little man grinned. “I’ve been a long time in politics, Ma’am, and I’ve seen funnier things than this. …” He put on his hat, as if to signal that he had said all he wanted to say. “But there’s one thing I’d like to ask … and that’s that you never let Michael know that I spoke to you about this.”
“Why should I promise … anything?”
-He moved nearer and said in a low voice, “You know Michael very well, Mrs. Pentland. … You know Michael very well, and you know that he’s got a bad, quick temper. If he found out that we were meddling in his affairs, he might do anything. He might chuck the whole business and clear out altogether. He’s never been like this about a woman before. He’d do it just now. … That’s the way he’s feeling. You don’t want to see him ruin himself any more than I do … a clever man like Michael. Why, he might be president one of these days. He can do anything he sets his will to, Ma’am, but he is, as they say, temperamental just now.”
-“I’ll not tell him,” said Olivia quietly. “And I’ll do what I can to help you. And now I must go.” She felt suddenly friendly toward Mr. Gavin, perhaps because what he had been telling her was exactly what she wanted most at that moment to hear. She leaned down from her horse and held out her hand, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Gavin.”
-Mr. Gavin removed his hat once more, revealing his round, bald, shiny head. “Good morning, Mrs. Pentland.”
+He moved nearer and said in a low voice, “You know Michael very well, Mrs. Pentland. … You know Michael very well, and you know that he’s got a bad, quick temper. If he found out that we were meddling in his affairs, he might do anything. He might chuck the whole business and clear out altogether. He’s never been like this about a woman before. He’d do it just now. … That’s the way he’s feeling. You don’t want to see him ruin himself any more than I do … a clever man like Michael. Why, he might be president one of these days. He can do anything he sets his will to, Ma’am, but he is, as they say, temperamental just now.”
+“I’ll not tell him,” said Olivia quietly. “And I’ll do what I can to help you. And now I must go.” She felt suddenly friendly toward Mr. Gavin, perhaps because what he had been telling her was exactly what she wanted most at that moment to hear. She leaned down from her horse and held out her hand, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Gavin.”
+Mr. Gavin removed his hat once more, revealing his round, bald, shiny head. “Good morning, Mrs. Pentland.”
As she rode off, the little man remained standing in the middle of the road looking after her until she had disappeared. His eye glowed with the light of admiration, but as Olivia turned from the road into the meadows, he frowned and swore aloud. Until now he hadn’t understood how a good politician like Michael could lose his head over any woman. But he had an idea that he could trust this woman to do what she had promised. There was a look about her … a look which made her seem different from most women; perhaps it was this look which had made a fool of Michael, who usually kept women in their proper places.
Grinning and shaking his head, he got into the Ford, started it with a great uproar, and set off in the direction of Boston. After he had gone a little way he halted again and got out, for in his agitation he had forgotten to close the hood.
From the moment she turned and rode away from Mr. Gavin, Olivia gave herself over to action. She saw that there was need of more than mere static truth to bring order out of the hazy chaos at Pentlands; there must be action as well. And she was angry now, really angry, even at Mr. Gavin for his impertinence, and at the unknown person who had been his informant. The strange idea that Aunt Cassie or Anson was somehow responsible still remained; tactics such as these were completely sympathetic to them—to go thus in Machiavellian fashion to a man like Gavin instead of coming to her. By using Mr. Gavin there would be no scene, no definite unpleasantness to disturb the enchantment of Pentlands. They could go on pretending that nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened.
+From the moment she turned and rode away from Mr. Gavin, Olivia gave herself over to action. She saw that there was need of more than mere static truth to bring order out of the hazy chaos at Pentlands; there must be action as well. And she was angry now, really angry, even at Mr. Gavin for his impertinence, and at the unknown person who had been his informant. The strange idea that Aunt Cassie or Anson was somehow responsible still remained; tactics such as these were completely sympathetic to them—to go thus in Machiavellian fashion to a man like Gavin instead of coming to her. By using Mr. Gavin there would be no scene, no definite unpleasantness to disturb the enchantment of Pentlands. They could go on pretending that nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened.
But stronger than her anger was the fear that in some way they might use the same tactics to spoil the happiness of Sybil. They would, she was certain, sacrifice everything to their belief in their own rightness.
She found Jean at the house when she returned, and, closing the door of the drawing-room, she said to him, “Jean, I want to talk to you for a moment … alone.”
-He said at once, “I know, Mrs. Pentland. It’s about Sybil.”
+He said at once, “I know, Mrs. Pentland. It’s about Sybil.”
There was a little echo of humor in his voice that touched and disarmed her as it always did. It struck her that he was still young enough to be confident that everything in life would go exactly as he wished it. …
“Yes,” she said, “that was it.” They sat on two of Horace Pentland’s chairs and she continued. “I don’t believe in meddling, Jean, only now there are circumstances … reasons. …” She made a little gesture. “I thought that if really … really. …”
-He interrupted her quickly. “I do, Mrs. Pentland. We’ve talked it all over, Sybil and I … and we’re agreed. We love each other. We’re going to be married.”
+He interrupted her quickly. “I do, Mrs. Pentland. We’ve talked it all over, Sybil and I … and we’re agreed. We love each other. We’re going to be married.”
Watching the young, ardent face, she thought, “It’s a nice face in which there is nothing mean or nasty. The lips aren’t thin and tight like Anson’s, nor the skin sickly and pallid the way Anson’s has always been. There’s life in it, and force and charm. It’s the face of a man who would be good to a woman … a man not in the least cold-blooded.”
“Do you love her … really?” she asked.
“I … I. … It’s a thing I can’t answer because there aren’t words to describe it.”
@@ -222,9 +222,9 @@Aloud she said, “That’s right, Jean. … I want you to take her away … no matter what happens, you must take her away. …” (“And then I won’t even have Sybil.”)
“We’re going to my ranch in the Argentine.”
“That’s right. … I think Sybil would like that.” She sighed, in spite of herself, vaguely envious of these two. “But you’re so young. How can you know for certain.”
-A shadow crossed his face and he said, “I’m twenty-five, Mrs. Pentland … but that’s not the only thing. … I was brought up, you see, among the French … like a Frenchman. That makes a difference.” He hesitated, frowning for a moment. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell. … You mightn’t understand. I know how things are in this part of the world. … You see, I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural … something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I’ve been in love before, casually … the way young Frenchmen are … but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can’t help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can’t help it. If it were just … just something shameful and nasty, he couldn’t endure it. They don’t have affairs in cold blood … the way I’ve heard men talk about such things since I’ve come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at the thing in the light they do. It’s different here. … I see the difference more every day.”
+A shadow crossed his face and he said, “I’m twenty-five, Mrs. Pentland … but that’s not the only thing. … I was brought up, you see, among the French … like a Frenchman. That makes a difference.” He hesitated, frowning for a moment. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell. … You mightn’t understand. I know how things are in this part of the world. … You see, I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural … something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I’ve been in love before, casually … the way young Frenchmen are … but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can’t help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can’t help it. If it were just … just something shameful and nasty, he couldn’t endure it. They don’t have affairs in cold blood … the way I’ve heard men talk about such things since I’ve come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at the thing in the light they do. It’s different here. … I see the difference more every day.”
He was talking earnestly, passionately, and when he paused for a moment she remained silent, unwilling to interrupt him until he had finished.
-“What I’m trying to say is difficult, Mrs. Pentland. It’s simply this … that I’m twenty-five, but I’ve had experience with life. Don’t laugh! Don’t think I’m just a college boy trying to make you think I’m a roué. Only what I say is true. I know about such things … and I’m glad because it makes me all the more certain that Sybil is the only woman in the world for me … the one for whom I’d sacrifice everything. And I’ll know better how to make her happy, to be gentle with her … to understand her. I’ve learned now, and it’s a thing which needs learning … the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love.” He turned away with a sudden air of sadness. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you all this. … I’ve told Sybil. She understands.”
+“What I’m trying to say is difficult, Mrs. Pentland. It’s simply this … that I’m twenty-five, but I’ve had experience with life. Don’t laugh! Don’t think I’m just a college boy trying to make you think I’m a roué. Only what I say is true. I know about such things … and I’m glad because it makes me all the more certain that Sybil is the only woman in the world for me … the one for whom I’d sacrifice everything. And I’ll know better how to make her happy, to be gentle with her … to understand her. I’ve learned now, and it’s a thing which needs learning … the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love.” He turned away with a sudden air of sadness. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you all this. … I’ve told Sybil. She understands.”
“No,” said Olivia, “I think you’re right … perhaps.” She kept thinking of the long tragic story of John Pentland, and of Anson, who had always been ashamed of love and treated it as something distasteful. To them it had been a dark, strange thing always touched by shame. She kept thinking, despite anything she could do, of Anson’s clumsy, artificial attempts at lovemaking, and she was swept suddenly by shame for him. Anson, so proud and supercilious, was a poor thing, inferior even to his own groom.
“But why,” she asked, “didn’t you tell me about Sybil sooner? Everyone has seen it, but you never spoke to me.”
For a moment he did not answer her. An expression of pain clouded the blue eyes, and then, looking at her directly, he said, “It’s not easy to explain why. I was afraid to come to you for fear you mightn’t understand, and the longer I’ve been here, the longer I’ve put it off because … well, because here in Durham, ancestors, family, all that, seems to be the beginning and end of everything. It seems always to be a question of who one’s family is. There is only the past and no future at all. And, you see, in a way … I haven’t any family.” He shrugged his big shoulders and repeated, “In a way, I haven’t any family at all. You see, my mother was never married to my father. … I’ve no blood-right to the name of de Cyon. I’m … I’m … well, just a bastard, and it seemed hopeless for me even to talk to a Pentland about Sybil.”
@@ -232,7 +232,7 @@He was talking again with the same passionate earnestness.
“I shan’t let it make any difference, so long as Sybil will have me, but, you see, it’s very hard to explain, because it isn’t the way it seems. I want you to understand that my mother is a wonderful woman. … I wouldn’t bother to explain, to say anything … except to Sybil and to you.”
“Sabine has told me about her.”
-“Mrs. Callendar has known her for a long time. … They’re great friends,” said Jean. “She understands.”
+“Mrs. Callendar has known her for a long time. … They’re great friends,” said Jean. “She understands.”
“But she never told me … that. You mean that she’s known it all along?”
“It’s not an easy thing to tell … especially here in Durham, and I fancy she thought it might make trouble for me … after she saw what had happened to Sybil and me.”
He went on quickly, telling her what he had told Sybil of his mother’s story, trying to make her understand what he understood, and Sabine and even his stepfather, the distinguished old de Cyon … trying to explain a thing which he himself knew was not to be explained. He told her that his mother had refused to marry her lover, “because in his life outside … the life which had nothing to do with her … she discovered that there were things she couldn’t support. She saw that it was better not to marry him … better for herself and for him and, most of all, for me. … He did things for the sake of success—mean, dishonorable things—which she couldn’t forgive … and so she wouldn’t marry him. And now, looking back, I think she was right. It made no great difference in her life. She lived abroad … as a widow, and very few people—not more than two or three—ever knew the truth. He never told because, being a politician, he was afraid of such a scandal. She didn’t want me to be brought up under such an influence, and I think she was right. He’s gone on doing things that were mean and dishonorable. … He’s still doing them today. You see he’s a politician … a rather cheap one. He’s a Senator now and he hasn’t changed. I could tell you his name. … I suppose some people would think him a distinguished man … only I promised her never to tell it. He thinks that I’m dead. … He came to her once and asked to see me, to have a hand in my education and my future. There were things, he said, that he could do for me in America … and she told him simply that I was dead … that I was killed in the war.” He finished in a sudden burst of enthusiasm, his face alight with affection. “But you must know her really to understand what I’ve been saying. Knowing her, you understand everything, because she’s one of the great people … the strong people of the world. You see, it’s one of the things which it is impossible to explain—to you or even to Sybil—impossible to explain to the others. One must know her.”
@@ -244,27 +244,27 @@“I shouldn’t know anything about it,” said Olivia quietly, “until it was too late to do anything.”
“It’s funny,” he said; “we’d thought of that. We’ve talked of it, only Sybil was afraid you’d want to have a big wedding and all that. …”
“No, I think it would be better not to have any wedding at all … especially under the circumstances.”
-“Mrs. Callendar suggested it as the best way out. … She offered to lend us her motor,” he said eagerly.
+“Mrs. Callendar suggested it as the best way out. … She offered to lend us her motor,” he said eagerly.
“You discussed it with her and yet you didn’t speak to me?”
“Well, you see, she’s different … she and Thérèse. … They don’t belong here in Durham. Besides, she spoke of it first. She knew what was going on. She always knows. I almost think that she planned the whole thing long ago.”
Olivia, looking out of the window, saw entering the long drive the antiquated motor with Aunt Cassie, Miss Peavey, her flying veils and her Pekinese.
-“Mrs. Struthers is coming …” she said. “We mustn’t make her suspicious. And you’d best tell me nothing of your plans and then … I shan’t be able to interfere even if I wanted to. I might change my mind … one never knows.”
-He stood up and, coming over to her, took her hand and kissed it. “There’s nothing to say, Mrs. Pentland … except that you’ll be glad for what you’ve done. You needn’t worry about Sybil. … I shall make her happy. … I think I know how.”
-He left her, hurrying away past the ancestors in the long hall to find Sybil, thinking all the while how odd it would seem to have a woman so young and beautiful as Mrs. Pentland for a mother-in-law. She was a charming woman (he thought in his enthusiasm), a great woman, but she was so sad, as if she had never been very happy. There was always a cloud about her.
+“Mrs. Struthers is coming …” she said. “We mustn’t make her suspicious. And you’d best tell me nothing of your plans and then … I shan’t be able to interfere even if I wanted to. I might change my mind … one never knows.”
+He stood up and, coming over to her, took her hand and kissed it. “There’s nothing to say, Mrs. Pentland … except that you’ll be glad for what you’ve done. You needn’t worry about Sybil. … I shall make her happy. … I think I know how.”
+He left her, hurrying away past the ancestors in the long hall to find Sybil, thinking all the while how odd it would seem to have a woman so young and beautiful as Mrs. Pentland for a mother-in-law. She was a charming woman (he thought in his enthusiasm), a great woman, but she was so sad, as if she had never been very happy. There was always a cloud about her.
He did not escape quickly enough, for Aunt Cassie’s sharp eyes caught a glimpse of him as he left the house in the direction of the stables. She met Olivia in the doorway, kissing her and saying, “Was that Sybil’s young man I saw leaving?”
“Yes,” said Olivia. “We’ve been talking about Sybil. I’ve been telling him that he mustn’t think of her as someone to marry.”
-The yellow face of Aunt Cassie lighted with a smile of approval. “I’m glad, my dear, that you’re being sensible about this. I was afraid you wouldn’t be, but I didn’t like to interfere. I never believe any good comes of it, unless one is forced to. He’s not the person for Sybil. … Why, no one knows anything about him. You can’t let a girl marry like that … just anyone who comes along. Besides, Mrs. Pulsifer writes me. … You remember her, Olivia, the Mannering boy’s aunt who used to have a house in Chestnut Street. … Well, she lives in Paris now at the Hotel Continental, and she writes me she’s discovered there’s some mystery about his mother. No one seems to know much about her.”
+The yellow face of Aunt Cassie lighted with a smile of approval. “I’m glad, my dear, that you’re being sensible about this. I was afraid you wouldn’t be, but I didn’t like to interfere. I never believe any good comes of it, unless one is forced to. He’s not the person for Sybil. … Why, no one knows anything about him. You can’t let a girl marry like that … just anyone who comes along. Besides, Mrs. Pulsifer writes me. … You remember her, Olivia, the Mannering boy’s aunt who used to have a house in Chestnut Street. … Well, she lives in Paris now at the Hotel Continental, and she writes me she’s discovered there’s some mystery about his mother. No one seems to know much about her.”
“Why,” said Olivia, “should she write you such a thing? What made her think you’d be interested?”
“Well, Kate Pulsifer and I went to school together and we still correspond now and then. I just happened to mention the boy’s name when I was writing her about Sabine. She says, by the way, that Sabine has very queer friends in Paris and that Sabine has never so much as called on her or asked her for tea. And there’s been some new scandal about Sabine’s husband and an Italian woman. It happened in Venice. …”
“But he’s not her husband any longer.”
The old lady seated herself and went on pouring forth the news from Kate Pulsifer’s letter; with each word she appeared to grow stronger and stronger, less and less yellow and worn.
(“It must be,” thought Olivia, “the effect of so many calamities contained in one letter.”)
-She saw now that she had acted only just in time and she was glad that she had lied, so flatly, so abruptly, without thinking why she had done it. For Mrs. Pulsifer was certain to go to the bottom of the affair, if for no other reason than to do harm to Sabine; she had once lived in a house on Chestnut Street with a bow-window which swept the entrance to every house. She was one of John Pentland’s dead, who lived by watching others live.
+She saw now that she had acted only just in time and she was glad that she had lied, so flatly, so abruptly, without thinking why she had done it. For Mrs. Pulsifer was certain to go to the bottom of the affair, if for no other reason than to do harm to Sabine; she had once lived in a house on Chestnut Street with a bow-window which swept the entrance to every house. She was one of John Pentland’s dead, who lived by watching others live.
From the moment she encountered Mr. Gavin on the turnpike until the tragedy which occurred two days later, life at Pentlands appeared to lose all reality for Olivia. When she thought of it long afterward, the hours became a sort of nightmare in which the old enchantment snapped and gave way to a strained sense of struggle between forces which, centering about herself, left her in the end bruised and a little broken, but secure.
+From the moment she encountered Mr. Gavin on the turnpike until the tragedy which occurred two days later, life at Pentlands appeared to lose all reality for Olivia. When she thought of it long afterward, the hours became a sort of nightmare in which the old enchantment snapped and gave way to a strained sense of struggle between forces which, centering about herself, left her in the end bruised and a little broken, but secure.
The breathless heat of the sort which from time to time enveloped that corner of New England, leaving the very leaves of the trees hanging limp and wilted, again settled down over the meadows and marshes, and in the midst of the afternoon appeared the rarest of sights—the indolent Sabine stirring in the burning sun. Olivia watched her coming across the fields, protected from the blazing sun only by the frivolous yellow parasol. She came slowly, indifferently, and until she entered the cool, darkened drawing-room she appeared the familiar bored Sabine; only after she greeted Olivia the difference appeared.
She said abruptly, “I’m leaving day after tomorrow,” and instead of seating herself to talk, she kept wandering restlessly about the room, examining Horace Pentland’s bibelots and turning the pages of books and magazines without seeing them.
“Why?” asked Olivia. “I thought you were staying until October.”
@@ -296,7 +296,7 @@Suddenly Olivia burst out angrily, “And why should it concern you, Sabine … in the least? Why should I not do as I please, without interference?”
“Because, here … and you know this as well as I do … here such a thing is impossible.”
In a strange fashion she was suddenly afraid of Sabine, perhaps because she was so bent upon pushing things to a definite solution. It seemed to Olivia that she herself was losing all power of action, all capacity for anything save waiting, pretending, doing nothing.
-“And I’m interested,” continued Sabine slowly, “because I can’t bear the tragic spectacle of another John Pentland and Mrs. Soames.”
+“And I’m interested,” continued Sabine slowly, “because I can’t bear the tragic spectacle of another John Pentland and Mrs. Soames.”
“There won’t be,” said Olivia desperately. “My father-in-law is different from Michael.”
“That’s true. …”
“In a way … a finer man.” She found herself suddenly in the amazing position of actually defending Pentlands.
@@ -307,7 +307,7 @@“I don’t want you to do a thing you will regret the rest of your life … bitterly.”
“You mean. …”
“Oh, I mean simply to give him up.”
-Again Olivia was silent, and Sabine asked suddenly. “Have you had a call from a Mr. Gavin? A gentleman with a bald head and a polished face?”
+Again Olivia was silent, and Sabine asked suddenly. “Have you had a call from a Mr. Gavin? A gentleman with a bald head and a polished face?”
Olivia looked at her sharply. “How could you know that?”
“Because I sent him, my dear … for the same reason that I’m here now … because I wanted you to do something … to act. And I’m confessing now because I thought you ought to know the truth, since I’m going away. Otherwise you might think Aunt Cassie or Anson had done it … and trouble might come of that.”
Again Olivia said nothing; she was lost in a sadness over the thought that, after all, Sabine was no better than the others.
@@ -329,14 +329,14 @@The heat clung on far into the evening, penetrating with the darkness even the drawing-room where they sat—Sabine and John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames and Olivia—playing bridge for the last time, and as the evening wore on the game went more and more badly, with the old lady forgetting her cards and John Pentland being patient and Sabine sitting in a controlled and sardonic silence, with an expression on her face which said clearly, “I can endure this for tonight because tomorrow I shall escape again into the lively world.”
-Jean and Sybil sat for a time at the piano, and then fell to watching the bridge. No one spoke save to bid or to remind Mrs. Soames that it was time for her shaking hands to distribute the cards about the table. Even Olivia’s low, quiet voice sounded loud in the hot stillness of the old room.
-At nine o’clock Higgins appeared with a message for Olivia—that Mr. O’Hara was being detained in town and that if he could get away before ten he would come down and stop at Pentlands if the lights were still burning in the drawing-room. Otherwise he would not be down to ride in the morning.
+The heat clung on far into the evening, penetrating with the darkness even the drawing-room where they sat—Sabine and John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames and Olivia—playing bridge for the last time, and as the evening wore on the game went more and more badly, with the old lady forgetting her cards and John Pentland being patient and Sabine sitting in a controlled and sardonic silence, with an expression on her face which said clearly, “I can endure this for tonight because tomorrow I shall escape again into the lively world.”
+Jean and Sybil sat for a time at the piano, and then fell to watching the bridge. No one spoke save to bid or to remind Mrs. Soames that it was time for her shaking hands to distribute the cards about the table. Even Olivia’s low, quiet voice sounded loud in the hot stillness of the old room.
+At nine o’clock Higgins appeared with a message for Olivia—that Mr. O’Hara was being detained in town and that if he could get away before ten he would come down and stop at Pentlands if the lights were still burning in the drawing-room. Otherwise he would not be down to ride in the morning.
Once during a pause in the game Sabine stirred herself to say, “I haven’t asked about Anson’s book. He must be near to the end.”
“Very near,” said Olivia. “There’s very little more to be done. Men are coming tomorrow to photograph the portraits. He’s using them to illustrate the book.”
At eleven, when they came to the end of a rubber, Sabine said, “I’m sorry, but I must stop. I must get up early tomorrow to see about the packing.” And turning to Jean she said, “Will you drive me home? Perhaps Sybil will ride over with us for the air. You can bring her back.”
At the sound of her voice, Olivia wanted to cry out, “No, don’t go. You mustn’t leave me now … alone. You mustn’t go away like this!” But she managed to say quietly, in a voice which sounded far away, “Don’t stay too late, Sybil,” and mechanically, without knowing what she was doing, she began to put the cards back again in their boxes.
-She saw that Sabine went out first, and then John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames, and that Jean and Sybil remained behind until the others had gone, until John Pentland had helped the old lady gently into his motor and driven off with her. Then, looking up with a smile which somehow seemed to give her pain she said, “Well?”
+She saw that Sabine went out first, and then John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames, and that Jean and Sybil remained behind until the others had gone, until John Pentland had helped the old lady gently into his motor and driven off with her. Then, looking up with a smile which somehow seemed to give her pain she said, “Well?”
And Sybil, coming to her side, kissed her and said in a low voice, “Goodbye, darling, for a little while. … I love you. …” And Jean kissed her in a shy fashion on both cheeks.
She could find nothing to say. She knew Sybil would come back, but she would be a different Sybil, a Sybil who was a woman, no longer the child who even at eighteen sometimes had the absurd trick of sitting on her mother’s knee. And she was taking away with her something that until now had belonged to Olivia, something which she could never again claim. She could find nothing to say. She could only follow them to the door, from where she saw Sabine already sitting in the motor as if nothing in the least unusual were happening; and all the while she wanted to go with them, to run away anywhere at all.
Through a mist she saw them turning to wave to her as the motor drove off, to wave gaily and happily because they were at the beginning of life. … She stood in the doorway to watch the motor-lights slipping away in silence down the lane and over the bridge through the blackness to the door of Brook Cottage. There was something about Brook Cottage … something that was lacking from the air of Pentlands: it was where Toby Cane and Savina Pentland had had their wanton meetings.