At the same moment Sybil looked at her mother and said, “It’s Jean de Cyon. … I’d forgotten that he was arriving tonight.” And then sadly, “Of course he doesn’t know.”
There was a sudden light in the girl’s eye, the merest flicker, dying out again quickly, which had a strange, intimate relation to the passionate music. Again it was life triumphing in death. Long afterward Olivia remembered it well … the light of something which went on and on.
VII
I
The news reached Aunt Cassie only the next morning at ten and it brought her, full of reproaches and tears, over the dusty lanes to Pentlands. She was hurt, she said, because they had not let her know at once. “I should have risen from my bed and come over immediately,” she repeated. “I was sleeping very badly, in any case. I could have managed everything. You should have sent for Aunt Cassie at once.”
And Olivia could not tell her that they had kept her in ignorance for that very reason—because they knew she would rise from her bed and come over at once.
Aunt Cassie it was who took the burden of the grief upon her narrow shoulders. She wept in the manner of a professional mourner. She drew the shades in the drawing-room, because in her mind death was not respectable unless the rooms were darkened, and sat there in a corner receiving callers, as if she were the one most bereft, as if indeed she were the only one who suffered at all. She returned to her own cupolaed dwelling only late at night and took all her meals at Pentlands, to the annoyance of her brother, who on the second day in the midst of lunch turned to her abruptly and said: “Cassie, if you can’t stop this eternal blubbering, I wish you’d eat at home. It doesn’t help anything.”
At which she had risen from the table, in a sudden climax of grief and persecution, to flee, sobbing and hurt, from the room. But she was not insulted sufficiently to take her meals at home. She stayed on at Pentlands because, she said, “They needed someone like me to help out. …” And to the trembling, inefficient Miss Peavey, who came and went like a frightened rabbit on errands for her, she confided her astonishment that her brother and Olivia should treat death with such indifference. They did not weep; they showed no signs of grief. She was certain that they lacked sensibility. They did not feel the tragedy. And, weeping again, she would launch into memories of the days when the boy had come as a little fellow to sit, pale and listless, on the floor of her big, empty drawing-room, turning the pages of the Doré Bible.
And to Miss Peavey she also said, “It’s at times like this that one’s breeding comes out. Olivia has failed for the first time. She doesn’t understand the things one must do at a time like this. If she had been brought up properly, here among us. …”
For with Aunt Cassie death was a mechanical, formalized affair which one observed by a series of traditional gestures.
It was a remarkable bit of luck, she said, that Bishop Smallwood (Sabine’s Apostle to the Genteel) was still in the neighborhood and could conduct the funeral services. It was proper that one of Pentland blood should bury a Pentland (as if no one else were quite worthy of such an honor). And she went to see the Bishop to discuss the matter of the services. She planned that immensely intricate affair, the seating of relations and connections—all the Canes and Struthers and Mannerings and Sutherlands and Pentlands—at the church. She called on Sabine to tell her that whatever her feelings about funerals might be, it was her duty to attend this one. Sabine must remember that she was back again in a world of civilized people who behaved as ladies and gentlemen. And to each caller whom she received in the darkened drawing-room, she confided the fact that Sabine must be an unfeeling, inhuman creature, because she had not even paid a visit to Pentlands.
But she did not know what Olivia and John Pentland knew—that Sabine had written a short, abrupt, almost incoherent note, with all the worn, tattered, pious old phrases missing, which had meant more to them than any of the cries and whispering and confusion that went on belowstairs, where the whole countryside passed in and out in an endless procession.
When Miss Peavey was not at hand to run errands for her, she made Anson her messenger. … Anson, who wandered about helpless and lost and troubled because death had interrupted the easy, eventless flow of a life in which usually all moved according to a set plan. Death had upset the whole household. It was impossible to know how Anson Pentland felt over the death of his son. He did not speak at all, and now that The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been laid aside in the midst of the confusion and Mr. Lowell’s desk stood buried beneath floral offerings, there was nothing to do but wander about getting in the way of everyone and drawing upon his head the sharp reproofs of Aunt Cassie.
It was Aunt Cassie and Anson who opened the great box of roses that came from O’Hara. It was Aunt Cassie’s thin, blue-veined hand that tore open the envelope addressed plainly to “Mrs. Anson Pentland.” It was Aunt Cassie who forced Anson to read what was written inside:
“Dear Mrs. Pentland,
“You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more.
And it was Aunt Cassie who said,
