Once he spoke, calling her wistfully by name, “Agnes”; but there was no sign of an answer, not so much as a faint flickering of the white, transparent lids.
And so for an eternity he sat thus in the thick darkness, enveloped by the sickly odor of medicines, until he was roused by a knock at the door and the sudden glare of daylight as it opened and Miss Egan, fixing her flashing and teethy smile, came in and said: “The fifteen minutes is up, Mr. Pentland.”
When the door had closed behind him he went away again, slowly, thoughtfully, down the worn stairs and out into the painfully brilliant sunlight of the bright New England spring. Crossing the green terrace, bordered with great clumps of iris and peonies and a few late tulips, he made his way to the stable-yard, where Higgins had left the red mare in charge of a Polish boy who did odd tasks about the farm. The mare, as beautiful and delicate as a fine steel spring, stood nervously pawing the gravel and tossing her handsome head. The boy, a great lout with a shock of yellow hair, stood far away from her holding the reins at arm’s length. At the sight of the two the old man laughed and said, “You mustn’t let her know you’re afraid of her, Ignaz.”
The boy gave up the reins and retired to a little distance, still watching the mare resentfully. “Well, she tried to bite me!” he said sullenly.
Quickly, with a youthful agility, John Pentland swung himself to her back … quickly enough to keep her from sidling away from him. There was a short, fierce struggle between the rider and the horse, and in a shower of stones they sped away down the lane that led across the meadows, past the thicket of black pines and the abandoned gravel-pit, toward the house of Mrs. Soames.
IV
In the solid corner of the world which surrounded Durham, Aunt Cassie played the role of an unofficial courier who passed from house to house, from piazza to piazza, collecting and passing on the latest bits of news. When one saw a low cloud of dust moving across the brilliant New England sky above the hedges and stone walls of the countryside, one could be certain that it masked the progress of Cassie Struthers on her daily round of calls. She went always on foot, because she detested motors and was terrified of horses; one might see her coming from a great distance, dressed always in dingy black, tottering along very briskly (for a woman of her age and well-advertised infirmities). One came to expect her arrival at a certain hour, for she was, unless there arose in her path some calamity or piece of news of unusual interest, a punctual woman whose life was as carefully ordered as the vast house in which she lived with the queer Aunt Bella.
It was a great box of a dwelling built by the late Mr. Struthers in the days of cupolas and gazebos on land given him by Aunt Cassie’s grandfather on the day of her wedding. Inside it was furnished with a great profusion of plush tassels and antimacassars, all kept with the neatness and rigidity of a museum. There were never any cigar ashes on the floor, nor any dust in the corners, for Aunt Cassie followed her servants about with the eye of a fussy old sergeant inspecting his barracks. Poor Miss Peavey, who grew more and more dowdy and careless as old age began to settle over her, led a life of constant peril, and was forced to build a little house near the stables to house her Pomeranians and her Siamese cats. For Aunt Cassie could not abide the thought of “the animals dirtying up the house.” Even the “retiring room” of the late Mr. Struthers had been converted since his death into a museum, spotless and purified of tobacco and whisky, where his chair sat before his desk, turned away from it a little, as if his spirit were still seated there. On the desk lay his pipe (as he had left it) and the neat piles of paper (carefully dusted each day but otherwise undisturbed) which he had put there with his own hand on the morning they found him seated on the chair, his head fallen back a little, as if asleep. And in the center of the desk lay two handsomely bound volumes—Cornices of Old Boston Houses and Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards—which he had written in these last sad years when his life seemed slowly to fade from him … the years in which Aunt Cassie seemed rapidly to recover the wiry strength and health for which she had been famous as a girl.
The house, people said, had been built by Mr. Struthers in the expectation of a large family, but it had remained great and silent of children’s voices as a tomb since the day it was finished, for Aunt Cassie had never been strong until it was too late for her to bear him heirs.
Sabine Callendar had a whole set of theories about the house and about the married life of Aunt Cassie, but they were theories which she kept, in her way, entirely to herself, waiting and watching until she was certain of them. There was a hatred between the two women that was implacable and difficult to define, an emotion almost of savagery which concealed itself beneath polite phrases and casual observations of an acid character. They encountered each other more frequently than Aunt Cassie would have wished, for Sabine, upon her return to Durham, took up Aunt Cassie’s habit of going from house to house on foot in search of news and entertainment. They met in drawing-rooms, on piazzas, and sometimes in the very dusty lanes, greeting each other with smiles and
