“Very like her mother. … Her mother is a remarkable woman … a charming woman … also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things, a really good and generous woman.”
“I’ve thought that. … I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to help me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she had a passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse … though she scarcely knew me. She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to know her. But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I haven’t seen her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. … It must be a queer life for a woman like that … young and beautiful.”
“She has a great deal to occupy her at Pentlands. And it’s true that it’s not a very fascinating life. Still, I’m sure she couldn’t bear being pitied. … She’s the last woman in the world to want pity.”
Curiously, O’Hara flushed, the red mounting slowly beneath the dark-tanned skin.
“I thought,” he said a little sadly, “that her husband or Mrs. Struthers might have raised objections. … I know how they feel toward me. There’s no use pretending not to know.”
“It is quite possible,” said Sabine.
There was a sudden embarrassing silence, which gave Sabine time to pull her wits together and organize a thousand sudden thoughts and impressions. She was beginning to understand, bit by bit, the real reasons of their hatred for O’Hara, the reasons which lay deep down underneath, perhaps so deep that none of them ever saw them for what they were.
And then out of the silence she heard the voice of O’Hara saying, in a queer, hushed way, “I mean to ask something of you … something that may sound ridiculous. I don’t pretend that it isn’t, but I mean to ask it anyway.”
For a moment he hesitated and then, rising quickly, he stood looking away from her out of the door, toward the distant blue marshes and the open sea. She fancied that he was trembling a little, but she could not be certain. What she did know was that he made an immense and heroic effort, that for a moment he, a man who never did such things, placed himself in a position where he would be defenseless and open to being cruelly hurt; and for the moment all the recklessness seemed to flow out of him and in its place there came a queer sadness, almost as if he felt himself defeated in some way. …
He said, “What I mean to ask you is this. … Will you ask me sometimes here to the cottage when she will be here too?” He turned toward her suddenly and added, “It will mean a great deal to me … more than you can imagine.”
She did not answer him at once, but sat watching him with a poorly concealed intensity; and presently, flicking the cigarette ashes casually from her gown, she asked, “And do you think it would be quite moral of me?”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her in astonishment, as if he had expected her, least of all people in the world, to ask such a thing.
“It might,” he said, “make us both a great deal happier.”
“Perhaps … perhaps not. It’s not so simple as that. Besides, it isn’t happiness that one places first at Pentlands.”
“No. … Still. …” He made a sudden vigorous gesture, as if to sweep aside all objections.
“You’re a queer man. … I’ll see what can be done.”
He thanked her and went out shyly without another word, to stride across the meadows, his black head bent thoughtfully, in the direction of his new bright chimneys. At his heels trotted the springer, which had lain waiting for him outside the door. There was something about the robust figure, crossing the old meadow through the blue twilight, that carried a note of lonely sadness. The self-confidence, the assurance, seemed to have melted away in some mysterious fashion. It was almost as if one man had entered the cottage a little while before and another, a quite different man, had left it just now. Only one thing, Sabine saw, could have made the difference, and that was the name of Olivia.
When he had disappeared Sabine went up to her room overlooking the sea and lay there for a long time thinking. She was by nature an indolent woman, especially at times when her brain worked with a fierce activity. It was working thus now, in a kind of fever, confused and yet tremendously clear; for the visits from Aunt Cassie and O’Hara had ignited her almost morbid passion for vicarious experience. She had a sense of being on the brink of some calamity which, beginning long ago in a hopeless tangle of origins and motives, was ready now to break forth with the accumulated force of years.
It was only now that she began to understand a little what it was that had drawn her back to a place which held memories so unhappy as those haunting the whole countryside of Durham. She saw that it must have been all the while a desire for vindication, a hunger to show them that, in spite of everything, of the straight red hair and the plain face, the silly ideas with which they had filled her head, in spite even of her unhappiness over her husband, she had made of her life a successful, even a brilliant, affair. She had wanted to show them that she stood aloof now and impregnable, quite beyond their power to curb or to injure her. And for a moment she suspected that the half-discerned motive was an even stronger thing, akin perhaps to a desire for vengeance; for she held this world about Durham responsible for the ruin of her happiness. She knew now, as a worldly woman of forty-six, that if she had been brought up knowing life for what it
