Olivia, watching her quietly, saw that this was no usual occasion. This was, in truth, the new Aunt Cassie whom Sabine had revealed to her a few days before … the aggressively virginal Aunt Cassie who had been born in that moment on the terrace to take the place of the old Aunt Cassie who had existed always in an aura of tears and good works and sympathy. She understood now what she had never understood before—that Aunt Cassie was not merely an irrational hypochondriac, a harmless, pitiful creature, but a ruthless and unscrupulous force. She knew that behind this emotional debauch there lay some deeply conceived plan. Vaguely she suspected that the plan was aimed at subduing herself, or bringing her (Olivia) completely under the will of the old woman. It was the insect again beating its wings frantically against the windows of a world which she could never enter. …
And softly Olivia said, “Surely, Aunt Cassie, there is no need to make a scene … there’s no need to be vulgar … at a time like this.”
The old woman, suddenly speechless, looked at her brother, but from him there came no sign of aid or succor; she must have seen, plainly, that he had placed himself on the side of Olivia … the outsider, who had dared to accuse a Pentland of being vulgar.
“You heard what she said, John. … You heard what she said! She called your sister vulgar!” But her hysterical mood began to abate suddenly, as if she saw that she had chosen, after all, the wrong plan of attack. Olivia did not answer her. She only sat there, looking pale and patient and beautiful in her black clothes, waiting. It was a moment unfair to Aunt Cassie. No man, even Anson, would have placed himself against Olivia just then.
“If you must know, Cassie …” the old man said slowly. “It’s a thing you won’t want to hear. But if you must know, it is simply that Horace Pentland’s body is at the station in Durham.”
Olivia had a quick sense of the whited sepulcher beginning to crack, to fall slowly into bits.
At first Aunt Cassie only stared at them, snuffling and wiping her red eyes, and then she said, in an amazingly calm voice, “You see. … You never tell me anything. I never knew he was dead.” There was a touch of triumph and vindication in her manner.
“There was no need of telling you, Cassie,” said the old man. “You wouldn’t let his name be spoken in the family for years. It was you—you and Anson—who made me threaten him into living abroad. Why should you care when he died?”
Aunt Cassie showed signs of breaking down once more. “You see, I’m always blamed for everything. I was thinking of the family all these years. We couldn’t have Horace running around loose in Boston.” She broke off with a sudden, fastidious gesture of disgust, as if she were washing her hands of the whole affair. “I could have managed it better myself. He ought never to have been brought home … to stir it all up again.”
Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt Cassie. “He wanted to be buried here. … He wrote to ask me, when he was dying.”
“He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his behavior. I say it again and I’ll keep on saying it. He ought never to have been brought back here … after people even forgot whether he was alive or dead.”
The perilous calm had settled over Olivia. … She had been looking out of the window across the marshes into the distance, and when she turned she spoke with a terrible quietness. She said: “You may do with Horace Pentland’s body what you like. It is more your affair than mine, for I never saw him in my life. But it is my son who is dead … my son, who belongs to me more than to any of you. You may bury Horace Pentland on the same day … at the same service, even in the same grave. Things like that can’t matter very much after death. You can’t go on pretending forever. … Death is too strong for that. It’s stronger than any of us puny creatures because it’s the one truth we can’t avoid. It’s got nothing to do with prejudices and pride and respectability. In a hundred years—even in a year, in a month, what will it matter what we’ve done with Horace Pentland’s body?”
She rose, still enveloped in the perilous calm, and said: “I’ll leave Horace Pentland to you two. There is none of his blood in my veins. Whatever you do, I shall not object … only I wouldn’t be too shabby in dealing with death.”
She went out, leaving Aunt Cassie exhausted and breathless and confused. The old woman had won her battle about the burial of Horace Pentland, yet she had suffered a great defeat. She must have seen that she had really lost everything, for Olivia somehow had gone to the root of things, in the presence of John Pentland, who was himself so near to death. (Olivia daring to say proudly, as if she actually scorned the Pentland name, “There is none of his blood in my veins.”)
But it was a defeat which Olivia knew she would never admit: that was one of the qualities which made it impossible to deal with Aunt Cassie. Perhaps, even as she
