“Sabine,” began Olivia.
“Sabine!” he interrupted. “Sabine! What does she care who he is or where he comes from? She’s given up decent people long ago, when she went away from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband. Sabine! … Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us … the people to whom she belongs. She hates us. … She can barely speak to me in a civil fashion.”
Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath the cold steel engraving of the Signing. “You are beginning to talk nonsense, Anson. Let’s stick to facts, for once. I’ve met the boy in Paris. … Sybil knew him there. He is intelligent and handsome and treats women as if they were something more than stable-boys. There are still a few of us left who like to be treated thus … as women … a few of us even here in Durham. No, I don’t imagine you’ll care for him. He won’t belong to your club or to your college, and he’ll see life in a different way. He won’t have had his opinions all ready made, waiting for him.”
“It’s my children I’m thinking of. … I don’t want them picking up with anyone, with the first person who comes along.”
Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, “If it’s Jack you’re worrying about, you needn’t fuss any longer. He won’t marry Thérèse. I don’t think you know how ill he is. … I don’t think, sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all.”
“I always talk with the doctors.”
“Then you ought to know that they’re silly … the things you’re saying.”
“All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here. …”
She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel of futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a cage, arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning with an air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the fireplace … pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark eyes. There was a fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which had flamed up so suddenly were too violent for the body.
“Anson,” she said in a low voice, “please let’s be sensible. I shall look into this affair of Sybil and O’Hara and try to discover whether there is anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly to both of them. I don’t approve, either, but not for the same reason. He is too old for her. You won’t have any trouble. You will have to do nothing. … As to Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I like.”
In the midst of the speech she had grown suddenly, perilously, calm in the way which sometimes alarmed her husband and Aunt Cassie. Sighing a little, she continued, “I have been good and gentle, Anson, for years and years, and now, tonight … tonight I feel as if I were coming to the end of it. … I only say this to let you know that it can’t go on forever.”
Picking up her scarf, she did not wait for him to answer her, but moved away toward the door, still enveloped in the same perilous calm. In the doorway she turned. “I suppose we can call the affair settled for the moment?”
He had been standing there all the while watching her out of the round cold blue eyes with a look of astonishment as if after all those years he had seen his wife for the first time; and then slowly the look of astonishment melted into one of slyness, almost of hatred, as if he thought, “So this is what you really are! So you have been thinking these things all these years and have never belonged to us at all. You have been hating us all the while. You have always been an outsider—a common, vulgar outsider.”
His thin, discontented lips had turned faintly gray, and when he spoke it was nervously, with a kind of desperation, like a small animal trapped in a corner. The words came out from the thin lips in a sharp, quick torrent, like the rush of white-hot steel released from a cauldron … words spoken in a voice that was cold and shaken with hatred.
“In any case,” he said, “in any case … I will not have my daughter marry a shanty Irishman. … There is enough of that in the family.”
For a moment Olivia leaned against the doorsill, her dark eyes wide with astonishment, as if she found it impossible to believe what she had heard. And then quietly, with a terrible sadness and serenity in her voice, she murmured almost to herself, “What a rotten thing to say!” And after a little pause, as if still speaking to herself, “So that is what you have been thinking for twenty years!” And again, “There is a terrible answer to that. … It’s so terrible that I shan’t say it, but I think you … you and Aunt Cassie know well enough what it is.”
Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated, among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare, she made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland ancestors—the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina Pentland—and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband had not followed her in more than fifteen years.
Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the darkness, listening, listening, listening. … There was at first no sound save the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the white dunes and the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the direction of the kennels, and then, presently, there came to her the faint sound of soft, easy breathing from the adjoining room. It was regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son had been
