The ghost accompanied Sabine up the long drive one hot morning while Olivia sat listening to Aunt Cassie. Olivia noticed that Sabine approached them with an unaccustomed briskness, that all trace of the familiar indolence had vanished. As she reached the edge of the terrace, she called out with a bright look in her eyes, “I have news … of Cousin Horace.”
She was enjoying the moment keenly, and the sight of her enjoyment must have filled Aunt Cassie, who knew her so well, with uneasiness. She took her own time about revealing the news, inquiring first after Aunt Cassie’s health, and settling herself comfortably in one of the wicker chairs. She was an artist in the business of tormenting the old lady and she waited now to squeeze every drop of effect out of her announcement. She was not to be hurried even by the expression which Aunt Cassie’s face inevitably assumed at the mention of Horace Pentland—the expression of one who finds himself in the vicinity of a bad smell and is unable to escape.
At last, after lighting a cigarette and moving her chair out of the sun, Sabine announced in a flat voice, “Cousin Horace has left everything he possesses to me.”
A look of passionate relief swept Aunt Cassie’s face, a look which said, “Pooh! Pooh! Is that all?” She laughed—it was almost a titter, colored by mockery—and said, “Is that all? I imagine it doesn’t make you a great heiress.”
(“Aunt Cassie,” thought Olivia, “ought not to have given Sabine such an opportunity; she has said just what Sabine wanted her to say.”)
Sabine answered her: “But you’re wrong there, Aunt Cassie. It’s not money that he’s left, but furniture … furniture and bibelots … and it’s a wonderful collection. I’ve seen it myself when I visited him at Mentone.”
“You ought never to have gone. … You certainly have lost all moral sense, Sabine. You’ve forgotten all that I taught you as a little girl.”
Sabine ignored her. “You see, he worshiped such things, and he spent twenty years of his life collecting them.”
“It seems improbable that they could be worth much … with as little money as Horace Pentland had … only what we let him have to live on.”
Sabine smiled again, sardonically, perhaps because the tilt with Aunt Cassie proved so successful. “You’re wrong again, Aunt Cassie. … They’re worth a great deal … far more than he paid for them, because there are things in his collection which you couldn’t buy elsewhere for any amount of money. He took to trading pieces off until his collection became nearly perfect.” She paused for a moment, allowing the knife to rest in the wound. “It’s an immensely valuable collection. You see, I know about it because I used to see Cousin Horace every winter when I went to Rome. I knew more about him than any of you. He was a man of perfect taste in such things. He really knew.”
Olivia sat all the while watching the scene with a quiet amusement. The triumph on this occasion was clearly Sabine’s, and Sabine knew it. She sat there enjoying every moment of it, watching Aunt Cassie writhe at the thought of so valuable a heritage going out of the direct family, to so remote and hostile a connection. It was clearly a disaster ranking in importance with the historic loss of Savina Pentland’s parure of pearls and emeralds at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It was property lost forever that should have gone into the family fortune.
Sabine was opening the letter slowly, allowing the paper to crackle ominously, as if she knew that every crackle ran painfully up and down the spine of the old lady.
“It’s the invoice from the Custom House,” she said, lifting each of the five long sheets separately. “Five pages long … total value perhaps as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. … Of course there’s not even any duty to pay, as they’re all old things.”
Aunt Cassie started, as if seized by a sudden pain, and Sabine continued, “He even left provision for shipping it … all save four or five big pieces which are being held at Mentone. There are eighteen cases in all.”
She began to read the items one by one … cabinets, commodes, chairs, lusters, tables, pictures, bits of bronze, crystal and jade … all the long list of things which Horace Pentland had gathered with the loving care of a connoisseur during the long years of his exile; and in the midst of the reading, Aunt Cassie, unable any longer to control herself, interrupted, saying, “It seems to me he was an ungrateful, disgusting man. It ought to have gone to my dear brother, who supported him all these years. I don’t see why he left it all to a remote cousin like you.”
Sabine delved again into the envelope. “Wait,” she said. “He explains that point himself … in his own will.” She opened a copy of this document and, searching for a moment, read, “To my cousin, Sabine Callendar (Mrs. Cane Callendar), of—Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France, and Newport, Rhode Island, I leave all my collections of furniture, tapestries, bibelots, etc., in gratitude for her kindness to me over a period of many years and in return for her faith and understanding at a time when the rest of my family treated me as an outcast.”
Aunt Cassie was beside herself. “And how should he have been treated if not as an outcast? He was an ungrateful, horrible wretch! It was Pentland money which supported him all his miserable life.”
