Chapter V (1)

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olivia displayed an interest by saying, “Was that what you wrote to the _Transcript_ about?”

“Yes ... and I was sure that the genealogical editor was wrong. See ... here it is in one of Jared Pentland’s letters at the time she was drowned.... Jared was her husband.... He refers to Toby Cane as her only male first cousin.”

“That will help you a great deal,” said Olivia, “won’t it?”

“It will help clear up the chapter about the origins of her family.” And then, after a little pause, “I wish that I could get some trace of the correspondence between Savina Pentland and Cane. I’m sure it would be full of things ... but it seems not to exist ... only one or two letters which tell nothing.”

And then he relapsed again into a complete and passionate silence, lost in the rustle of old books and yellowed letters, leaving the legend of Savina Pentland to take possession of the others in the room.

The memory of this woman had a way of stealing in upon the family unaware, quite without their willing it. She was always there in the house, more lively than any of the more sober ancestors, perhaps because of them all she alone had been touched by splendor; she alone had been in her reckless way a great lady. There was a power in her recklessness and extravagance which came, in the end, to obscure all those other plain, solemn-faced, thrifty wives whose portraits adorned the hall of Pentlands, much as a rising sun extinguishes the feeble light of the stars. And about her obscure origin there clung a perpetual aura of romance, since there was no one to know just who her mother was or exactly whence she came. The mother was born perhaps of stock no humbler than the first shopkeeping Pentland to land on the Cape, but there was in her the dark taint of Portuguese blood; some said that she was the daughter of a fisherman. And Savina herself had possessed enough of fascination to lure a cautious Pentland into eloping with her against the scruples that were a very fiber of the Pentland bones and flesh.

The portrait of Savina Pentland stood forth among the others in the white hall, fascinating and beautiful not only because the subject was a dark, handsome woman, but because it had been done by Ingres in Rome during the years when he made portraits of tourists to save himself from starvation. It was the likeness of a small but voluptuous woman with great wanton dark eyes and smooth black hair pulled back from a camellia-white brow and done in a little knot on the nape of the white neck--a woman who looked out of the old picture with the flashing, spirited glance of one who lived boldly and passionately. She wore a gown of peach-colored velvet ornamented with the famous parure of pearls and emeralds given her, to the scandal of a thrifty family, by the infatuated Jared Pentland. Passing the long gallery of portraits in the hallway it was always Savina Pentland whom one noticed. She reigned there as she must have reigned in life, so bold and splendorous as to seem a bit vulgar, especially in a world of such sober folk, yet so beautiful and so spirited that she made all the others seem scarcely worth consideration.

Even in death she had remained an “outsider,” for she was the only one of the family who did not rest quietly among the stunted trees at the top of the bald hill where the first Pentlands had laid their dead. All that was left of the warm, soft body lay in the white sand at the bottom of the ocean within sight of Pentlands. It was as if fate had delivered her in death into a grave as tempestuous and violent as she had been in life. And somewhere near her in the restless white sand lay Toby Cane, with whom she had gone sailing one bright summer day when a sudden squall turned a gay excursion into a tragedy.

Even Aunt Cassie, who distrusted any woman with gaze so bold and free as that set down by the brush of Ingres--even Aunt Cassie could not annihilate the glamour of Savina’s legend. For her there was, too, another, more painful, memory hidden in the knowledge that the parure of pearls and emeralds and all the other jewels which Savina Pentland had wrung from her thrifty husband, lay buried somewhere in the white sand between her bones and those of her cousin. To Aunt Cassie Savina Pentland seemed more than merely a reckless, extravagant creature. She was an enemy of the Pentland fortune and of all the virtues of the family.

The family portraits were of great value to Anson in compiling his book, for they represented the most complete collection of ancestors existing in all America. From the portrait of the emigrating Pentland, painted in a wooden manner by some traveling painter of tavern signs, to the rather handsome one of John Pentland, painted at middle-age in a pink coat by Sargent, and the rather bad and liverish one of Anson, also by Mr. Sargent, the collection was complete save for two--the weak Jared Pentland who had married Savina, and the Pentland between old John’s father and the clipper-ship owner, who had died at twenty-three, a disgraceful thing for any Pentland to have done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not a bad idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

“No, not on a night like this.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There will always be our children.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *