“No,” said Olivia quickly, “nothing which could possibly have interested her.”
“It’s some queer idea she’s hatched up,” replied Miss Egan, and looked at Olivia as if she doubted the truth of what she had said.
She did not go downstairs at once. Instead, she went to her own room and after bathing, seated herself in the chaise longue by the open window above the terrace, prepared to read the letters one by one. From below there arose a murmur of voices, one metallic and hard, the other nervous, thin, and high-pitched—Sabine’s and Aunt Cassie’s—as they sat on the terrace in acid conversation, each trying to outstay the other. Listening, Olivia decided that she was a little weary of them both this morning; it was the first time it had ever occurred to her that in a strange way there was a likeness between two women who seemed so different. That curious pair, who hated each other so heartily, had the same way of trying to pry into her life.
None of the letters bore any dates, so she fell to reading them in the order in which they had been found, beginning with the one which read:
Carissima,
I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and, was still there at Pentlands with you. …
She read on:
It’s the thought of his being there beside you, even taking possession of you sometimes, that I can’t bear. I see him sitting there in the drawing-room, looking at you—eating you with his eyes and pretending all the while that he is above the lusts of the flesh. The flesh! The flesh! You and I, dearest, know the glories of the flesh. Sometimes I think I’m a coward not to kill him at once.
For God’s sake, get rid of him somehow tonight. I can’t pass another evening alone in the dark gloomy cottage waiting in vain. It is more than I can bear to sit there knowing that every minute, every second, may bring the sound of your step. Be merciful to me. Get rid of him somehow.
I have not touched a drop of anything since I last saw you. Are you satisfied with that?
I am sending this in a book by black Hannah. She will wait for an answer.
Slowly, as she read on and on through the mazes of the impetuous, passionate writing, the voices from the terrace below, the one raised now and a little angry, the other still metallic, hard and indifferent, grew more and more distant until presently she did not hear them at all and in the place of the sound her senses received another impression—that of a curious physical glow, stealing slowly through her whole body. It was as if there lay in that faded brown writing a smoldering fire that had never wholly died out and would never be extinguished until the letters themselves had been burned into ashes.
Word by word, line by line, page by page, the whole tragic, passionate legend came to recreate itself, until near the end she was able to see the three principal actors in it with the reality of life, as if they had never died at all but had gone on living in this old house, perhaps in this very room where she sat … the very room which once must have belonged to Savina Pentland.
She saw the husband, that Jared Pentland of whom no portrait existed because he would never spend money on such a luxury, as he must have been in life—a sly man, shrewd and pious and avaricious save when the strange dark passion for his wife made of him an unbalanced creature. And Savina Pentland herself was there, as she looked out of the Ingres portrait—dark, voluptuous, reckless, with her bad enticing eyes—a woman who might easily be the ruin of a man like Jared Pentland. And somehow she was able to get a clear and vivid picture of the writer of those smoldering letters—a handsome scamp of a lover, dark like his cousin Savina, and given to drinking and gambling. But most of all she was aware of that direct, unashamed and burning passion that never had its roots in this stony New England soil beyond the windows of Pentlands. A man who frankly glorified the flesh! A waster! A seducer! And yet a man capable of this magnificent fire which leaped up from the yellow pages and warmed her through and through. It occurred to her then for the first time that there was something heroic and noble and beautiful in a passion so intense. For a moment she was even seized by the feeling that reading these letters was a kind of desecration.
They revealed, too, how Jared Pentland had looked upon his beautiful wife as a fine piece of property, an investment which gave him a sensual satisfaction and also glorified his house and dinner-table. (What Sabine called the “lower middle-class sense of property.”) He must have loved her and hated her at once, in the way Higgins loved and hated the handsome red mare. He must have been proud of her and yet hated her because she possessed so completely the power of making a fool of him. The whole story moved against a background of family … the Pentland family. There were constant references to cousins and uncles and aunts and their suspicions and interference.
“It must have begun,” thought Olivia, “even in those days.”
Out of the letters she learned that the passion had begun in Rome when Savina Pentland was sitting for her portrait by Ingres. Toby Cane had been there with her and afterwards she had gone with him to his lodgings; and when they had returned to the house at Durham (almost new then and the biggest country seat in all New England) they had met in
