“No …” said the grandfather suddenly. “It’s a funny thing. He’s never wrong … not in all the years I’ve known him.”
It was the only time he said anything during the meal, and Olivia, trying to fill in the gaps in the conversation, found it difficult, with the boy sitting opposite her looking so pale and ill. It seemed to her sometimes that he had never really been born, that he had always remained in some way a part of herself. When he was out of her sight, she had no peace because there was always a gnawing terror that she might never see him again. And she knew that deep inside the frail body there was a spirit, a flame, descended from the old man and from herself, which burned passionately with a desire for life, for riding, for swimming, for running across the open meadows … a flame that must always be smothered. If only he had been like Anson, his father, who never knew that hunger for life. …
“Olivia, my dear …” The old man was speaking. “Will you have your coffee with me in the library? There is something I want to discuss with you.”
She knew it then. She had been right. There was something which troubled him. He always said the same thing when he was faced by some problem too heavy for his old shoulders. He always said, “Olivia, my dear. … Will you come into the library?” He never summoned his own son, or his sister Cassie … no one but Olivia. Between them they shared secrets which the others never dreamed of; and when he died, all the troubles would be hers … they would be passed on for her to deal with … those troubles which existed in a family which the world would have said was rich and respected and quite without troubles.
IV
As she left the room to follow him she stopped for a moment to say to Sybil, “Are you happy, my dear? You’re not sorry that you aren’t going back to school in Saint-Cloud?”
“No, Mama; why shouldn’t I be happy here? I love it, more than anything in the world.”
The girl thrust her hands into the pockets of her riding-coat.
“You don’t think I was wrong to send you to France to school … away from everyone here?”
Sybil laughed and looked at her mother in the frank, half-mocking way she had when she fancied she had uncovered a plot.
“Are you worrying about marrying me off? I’m only eighteen. I’ve lots of time.”
“I’m worrying because I think you’ll be so hard to please.”
Again she laughed. “That’s true. That’s why I’m going to take my time.”
“And you’re glad to have Thérèse here?”
“Of course. You know I like Thérèse awfully, Mama.”
“Very well … run along now. I must speak to your grandfather.”
And the girl went out onto the terrace where Jack stood waiting in the sun for the trap. He always followed the sun, choosing to sit in it even in midsummer, as if he were never quite warm enough.
She was worried over Sybil. She had begun to think that perhaps Aunt Cassie was right when she said that Sybil ought to go to a boarding-school with the girls she had always known, to grow loud and noisy and awkward and play hockey and exchange silly notes with the boys in the boarding-school in the next village. Perhaps it was wrong to have sent Sybil away to a school where she would meet girls from France and England and Russia and South America … half the countries of the world; a school where, as Aunt Cassie had said bitterly, she would be forced to associate with the “daughters of dancers and opera singers.” She knew now that Sybil hadn’t liked the ball any more than Thérèse, who had run away from it without a word of explanation. Only with Thérèse it didn’t matter so much, because the dark stubborn head was filled with all sorts of wild notions about science and painting and weird books on psychology. There was a loneliness about Thérèse and her mother, Sabine Callendar, only with them it didn’t matter. They had, too, a hardness, a sense of derision and scorn which protected them. Sybil hadn’t any such protections. Perhaps she was even wrong in having made of Sybil a lady—a lady in the old sense of the word—because there seemed to be no place for a lady in the scheme of life as it had existed at the dance the night before. It was perilous, having a lady on one’s hands, especially a lady who was certain to take life as passionately as Sybil.
She wanted the girl to be happy, without quite understanding that it was because Sybil seemed the girl she had once been herself, a very part of herself, the part which had never lived at all.
She found her father-in-law seated at his great mahogany desk in the high narrow room walled with books which was kept sacred to him, at the desk from which he managed the farm and watched over a fortune, built up bit by bit shrewdly, thriftily over three hundred years, a fortune which he had never brought himself to trust in the hands of his son. It was, in its gloomy, cold way, a pleasant room, smelling of dogs and apples and woodsmoke, and sometimes of whisky, for it was here that the old man retired when, in a kind of baffled frenzy, he drank himself to insensibility. It was here that he would sometimes sit for a day and a night, even sleeping in his leather chair, refusing to see anyone save Higgins, who watched over him, and Olivia. And so it was Olivia and Higgins who alone knew the spectacle of this solitary drinking. The world and even the family knew very little of it—only the little which sometimes leaked out from the gossip of servants straying at night along the dark lanes and hedges about Durham.
He sat with his
