But she was puzzled, Olivia, because underneath the dressing-gown Miss Egan had thrown about her shoulders she saw that the nurse was dressed neither in nightclothes nor in her uniform, but in the suit of blue serge that she wore on the rare occasions when she went into the city.
V
She spoke to no one of what had happened, either on the terrace or in the lane or in the depths of the old attic, and the days came to resume again their old monotonous round, as if the strange, hot, disturbing night had had no more existence than a dream. She did not see O’Hara, yet she heard of him, constantly, from Sybil, from Sabine, even from Jack, who seemed stronger than he had ever been and able for a time to go about the farm with his grandfather in the trap drawn by an old white horse. There were moments when it seemed to Olivia that the boy might one day be really well, and yet there was never any real joy in those moments, because always in the back of her mind stood the truth. She knew it would never be, despite all that fierce struggle which she and the old man kept up perpetually against the thing which was stronger than either of them. Indeed, she even found a new sort of sadness in the sight of the pale thin boy and the rugged old man driving along the lanes in the trap, the eyes of the grandfather bright with a look of deluding hope. It was a look which she found unbearable because it was the first time in years, almost since that first day when Jack, as a tiny baby who did not cry enough, came into the world, that the expression of the old man had changed from one of grave and uncomplaining resignation.
Sometimes when she watched them together she was filled with a fierce desire to go to John Pentland and tell him that it was not her fault that there were not more children, other heirs to take the place of Jack. She wanted to tell him that she would have had ten children if it were possible, that even now she was still young enough to have more children. She wanted to pour out to him something of that hunger of life which had swept over her on the night in Sabine’s garden beneath the apple-tree, a spot abounding in fertility. But she knew, too, how impossible it was to discuss a matter which old John Pentland, in the depths of his soul believed to be “indelicate.” Such things were all hidden behind a veil which shut out so much of truth from all their lives. There were times when she fancied he understood it all, those times when he took her hand and kissed her affectionately. She fancied that he understood and that the knowledge lay somehow at the root of the old man’s quiet contempt for his own son.
But she saw well enough the tragedy that lay deep down at the root of the whole matter. She understood that it was not Anson who was to blame. It was that they had all been caught in the toils of something stronger than any of them, a force which with a cruel injustice compelled her to live a dry, monotonous, barren existence when she would have embraced life passionately, which compelled her to watch her own son dying slowly before her eyes.
Always she came back to the same thought, that the boy must be kept alive until his grandfather was dead; and sometimes, standing on the terrace, looking out across the fields, Olivia saw that old Mrs. Soames, dressed absurdly in pink, with a large picture-hat, was riding in the trap with the old man and his grandson, as if in reality she were the grandmother of Jack instead of the mad old woman abovestairs.
The days came to resume their round of dull monotony, and yet there was a difference, odd and indefinable, as if in some way the sun were brighter than it had been, as if those days, when even in the bright sunlight the house had seemed a dull gray place, were gone now. She could no longer look across the meadows toward the bright new chimneys of O’Hara’s house without a sudden quickening of breath, a warm pleasant sensation of no longer standing quite alone.
She was not even annoyed any longer by the tiresome daily visits of Aunt Cassie, nor by the old woman’s passion for pitying her and making wild insinuations against Sabine and O’Hara and complaining of Sybil riding with him in the mornings over the dew-covered fields. She was able now simply to sit there politely as she had once done, listening while the old woman talked on and on; only now she did not even listen with attention. It seemed to her at times that Aunt Cassie was like some insect beating itself frantically against a pane of glass, trying over and over again with an unflagging futility to enter where it was impossible to enter.
It was Sabine who gave her a sudden glimpse of penetration into this instinct about Aunt Cassie, Sabine who spent all her time finding out about people. It happened one morning that the two clouds of dust, the one made by Aunt Cassie and the other by Sabine, met at the very foot of the long drive leading up to Pentlands, and together the two women—one dressed severely in shabby black, without so much as a fleck of powder on her nose, the other dressed expensively in what some Paris dressmaker chose to call a costume de sport, with her face made up like a Parisian—arrived together to sit on the piazza of Pentlands insulting each other subtly for an hour. When at last Sabine
