“Yes, better than he has been in a long time.”
“Perhaps, after all, the doctors are wrong.”
Olivia sighed and said quietly, “If we had believed the doctors we should have lost him long ago.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
She poured her coffee and he murmured, “It’s about Horace Pentland I wanted to speak. He’s dead. I got the news this morning. He died in Mentone and now it’s a question whether we shall bring him home here to be buried in Durham with the rest of the family.”
Olivia was silent for a moment and then, looking up, said “What do you think? How long has it been that he has lived in Mentone?”
“It’s nearly thirty years now that I’ve been sending him money to stay there. He’s only a cousin. Still, we had the same grandfather and he’d be the first of the family in three hundred years who isn’t buried here.”
“There was Savina Pentland. …”
“Yes. … But she’s buried out there, and she would have been buried here if it had been possible.”
And he made a gesture in the direction of the sea, beyond the marshes where the beautiful Savina Pentland, almost a legend now, lay, somewhere deep down in the soft white sand at the bottom of the ocean.
“Would he want to be buried here?” asked Olivia.
“He wrote and asked me … a month or two before he died. It seemed to be on his mind. He put it in a strange way. He wrote that he wanted to come home.”
Again Olivia was thoughtful for a time. “Strange …” she murmured presently, “when people were so cruel to him.”
The lips of the old man stiffened a little.
“It was his own fault. …”
“Still … thirty years is a long time.”
He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. “You mean that everything may have been forgotten by now?”
Olivia made a little gesture with her white, ringless hands. “Why not?”
“Because people don’t forget things like that … not in our world, at any rate.”
Quietly, far back in her mind, Olivia kept trying to imagine this Horace Pentland whom she had never seen, this shadowy old man, dead now, who had been exiled for thirty years.
“You have no reason for not wanting him here among all the others?”
“No … Horace is dead now. … It can’t matter much whether what’s left of him is buried here or in France.”
“Except, of course, that they may have been kinder to him over there. … They’re not so harsh.”
A silence fell over them, as if in some way the spirit of Horace Pentland, the sinner whose name was never spoken in the family save between Olivia and the old man, had returned and stood between them, waiting to hear what was to be done with all that remained of him on this earth. It was one of those silences which, descending upon the old house, sometimes filled Olivia with a vague uneasiness. They had a way of descending upon the household in the long evenings when all the family sat reading in the old drawing-room—as if there were figures unseen who stood watching.
“If he wanted to be buried here,” said Olivia, “I can see no reason why he should not be.”
“Cassie will object to raking up an old scandal that has been forgotten.”
“Surely that can’t matter now … when the poor old man is dead. We can be kind to him now … surely we can be kind to him now.”
John Pentland sighed abruptly, a curious, heartbreaking sigh that seemed to have escaped even his power of steely control; and presently he said, “I think you are right, Olivia. … I will do as you say … only we’ll keep it a secret between us until the time comes when it’s necessary to speak. And then … then we’ll have a quiet funeral.”
She would have left him then save that she knew from his manner that there were other things he wanted to say. He had a way of letting you know his will without speaking. Somehow, in his presence you felt that it was impossible to leave until he had dismissed you. He still treated his own son, who was nearly fifty, as if he were a little boy.
Olivia waited, busying herself by rearranging the late lilacs which stood in a tall silver vase on the polished mahogany desk.
“They smell good,” he said abruptly. “They’re the last, aren’t they?”
“The last until next spring.”
“Next spring …” he repeated with an air of speaking to himself. “Next spring. …” And then abruptly, “The other thing was about Sabine. The nurse tells me she has discovered that Sabine is here.” He made the family gesture toward the old north wing. “She has asked to see Sabine.”
“Who told her that Sabine had returned? How could she have discovered it?”
“The nurse doesn’t know. She must have heard someone speaking the name under her window. The nurse says that people in her condition have curious ways of discovering such things … like a sixth sense.”
“Do you want me to ask Sabine? She’d come if I asked her.”
“It would be unpleasant. Besides, I think it might do harm in some way.”
Olivia was silent for a moment. “How? She probably wouldn’t remember Sabine. When she saw her last, Sabine was a young girl.”
“She’s gotten the idea now that we’re all against her, that we’re persecuting her in some way.” He coughed and blew a cloud of smoke out of his thin-drawn lips. “It’s difficult to explain what I mean. … I mean that Sabine might encourage that feeling … quite without meaning to, that Sabine might give her the impression
