It was all confused and tormented and vague, yet the visit of Aunt Cassie, filled with implications and veiled attempts to humble her, had cleared the air enormously.
And behind the closed lids, the green eyes began to see a whole procession of calamities which lay perhaps within her power to create. She began to see how it might even be possible to bring the whole world of Pentlands down about their heads in a collapse which could create only freedom and happiness to Olivia and her daughter. And it was these two alone for whom she had any affection; the others might be damned, gloriously damned, while she stood by without raising a finger.
She began to see where the pieces of the puzzle lay, the wedges which might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world that once more surrounded her.
Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of power, of having all the tools at hand, of being the dea ex machina of the calamity.
She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the end even money could not save them. There came a time when a great fortune might be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.
She was still lying there when Thérèse came in—a short, plain, rather stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead. She was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired unhappy little girl had been so many times in that far-off, half-forgotten childhood.
“Where have you been?” she asked indifferently, for there was always a curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.
“Catching frogs to dissect,” said Thérèse. “They’re damned scarce and I slipped into the river.”
Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance of marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found satisfaction in the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse’s life so that no one could ever hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer nomadic life they had led together, meeting all sorts of men and women who were, in Sabine’s curious sense of the word, “complete,” the girl had pierced her way somehow to the bottom of things. She was building her young life upon a rock, so that she could afford to feel contempt for the very forces which long ago had hurt her mother. She might, like O’Hara, be suddenly humbled by love; but that, Sabine knew, was a glorious thing well worth suffering.
She knew it each time that she looked at her child and saw the clear gray eyes of the girl’s father looking out of the dark face with the same proud look of indifferent confidence which had fascinated her twenty years ago. So long as Thérèse was alive, she would never be able wholly to forget him.
“Go wash yourself,” she said. “Old Mr. Pentland and Olivia and Mrs. Soames are coming to dine and play bridge.”
As she dressed for dinner she no longer asked herself, “Why did I ever imagine Thérèse might find a husband here? What ever induced me to come back here to be bored all summer long?”
She had forgotten all that. She began to see that the summer held prospects of diversion. It might even turn into a fascinating game. She knew that her return had nothing to do with Thérèse’s future; she had been drawn back into Durham by some vague but overwhelming desire for mischief.
V
I
When Anson Pentland came down from the city in the evening, Olivia was always there to meet him dutifully and inquire about the day. The answers were always the same: “No there was not much doing in town,” and, “It was very hot,” or “I made a discovery today that will be of great use to me in the book.”
Then after a bath he would appear in tweeds to take his exercise in the garden, pottering about mildly and peering closely with his nearsighted blue eyes at little tags labeled “General Pershing” or “Caroline Testout” or “Poincaré” or “George Washington” which he tied carefully on the new dahlias and roses and smaller shrubs. And, more often than not, the gardener would spend half the next morning removing the tags and placing them on the proper plants, for Anson really had no interest in flowers and knew very little about them. The tagging was only a part of his passion for labeling things; it made the garden at Pentlands seem a more subdued and ordered place. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that he went through life ticketing and pigeonholing everything that came his way: manners, emotions, thoughts, everything. It was a habit that was growing on him in middle-age.
Dinner was usually late because Anson liked to take advantage of the long summer twilights, and after dinner it was the habit of all the family, save Jack, who went to bed immediately afterward, to sit in the Victorian drawing-room, reading and writing letters or sometimes playing patience, with Anson in his corner at Mr. Lowell’s desk working over The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and keeping up a prodigious correspondence with librarians and old men and women of a genealogical bent. The routine of the evening rarely changed, for Anson disliked going out and Olivia preferred not to go alone. It was only with
