And then she thought, as if she were conscious of it for the first time, “I am tired, tired to death, and a little mad.”
Moving across the damp grass she seated herself on a stone bench which O’Hara had placed beneath one of the ancient apple-trees left standing from the orchard which had covered all the land about Brook Cottage in the days when Savina Pentland was still alive; and for a long time (she never knew how long) she remained there lost in one of those strange lapses of consciousness when one is neither awake nor asleep but in the vague borderland where there is no thought, no care, no troubles. And then slowly she became aware of someone standing there quite near her, beneath the ancient, gnarled tree. As if the presence were materialized somehow out of a dream, she noticed first the faint, insinuating masculine odor of cigar-smoke blending itself with the scent of the growing flowers in Sabine’s garden, and then turning she saw a black figure which she recognized at once as that of O’Hara. There was no surprise in the sight of him; it seemed in a queer way as if she had been expecting him.
As she turned, he moved toward her and spoke. “Our garden has flourished, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You’d never think it was only a year old.”
“Yes,” she said. “It has flourished marvelously.” And then, after a little pause, “How long have you been standing there?”
“Only a moment. I saw you come out of the house.” They listened for a time to the distant melancholy pounding of the surf, and presently he said softly, with a kind of awe in his voice: “It is a marvelous night … a night full of splendor.”
She made an effort to answer him, but somehow she could think of nothing to say. The remark, uttered so quietly, astonished her, because she had never thought of O’Hara as one who would be sensitive to the beauty of a night. It was too dark to distinguish his face, but she kept seeing him as she remembered him, seeing him, too, as the others thought of him—rough and vigorous but a little common, with the scar on his temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: “It is a night full of splendor.” The men she knew—Anson’s friends—never said such things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done anything so unusual.
“The party is not a great success,” he was saying.
“No.”
“No one seems to be getting on with anyone else. Mrs. Callendar ought not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that.”
Olivia laughed softly. “She may have done it on purpose. You can never tell why she does anything.”
For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he said, “You aren’t cold out here?”
“No, not on a night like this.”
There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.
“I keep wondering,” she said, “how long it will be until the bungalows of Durham creep down and cover all this land.”
“They won’t, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea.”
In the darkness she smiled at the thought of an Irish Roman Catholic politician as the protector of this old New England countryside, and aloud she said, “You’re growing to be like all the others. You want to make the world stand still.”
“Yes, I can see that it must seem funny to you.” There was no bitterness in his voice, but only a sort of hurt, which again astonished her, because it was impossible to think of O’Hara as one who could be hurt.
“There will always be the Pentland house, but, of course, all of us will die some day and then what?”
“There will always be our children.”
She was aware slowly of slipping back into that world of cares and troubles behind her from which she had escaped a little while before. She said, “You are looking a long way into the future.”
“Perhaps, but I mean to have children one day. And at Pentlands there is always Sybil, who will fight for it fiercely. She’ll never give it up.”
“But it’s Jack who will own it, and I’m not so sure about him.”
Unconsciously she sighed, knowing now that she was pretending again, being dishonest. She was pretending again that Jack would live to have Pentlands for his own, that he would one day have children who would carry it on. She kept saying to herself, “It is only the truth that can save us all.” And she knew that O’Hara understood her feeble game of pretending. She knew because he stood there silently, as if Jack were already dead, as if he understood the reason for the faint bitter sigh and respected it.
“You see a great deal of Sybil,
