Olivia, listening, wanted to say, “You don’t know how much blood there is in the Pentlands. … You don’t know that they aren’t Pentlands at all, but the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane. … But even that hasn’t mattered. … The very air, the very earth of New England, has changed them, dried them up.”
But she could not say it, for she knew that the story of those letters must never fall into the hands of the unscrupulous Sabine.
“It doesn’t bore me,” said Olivia quietly. “It doesn’t bore me. I understand it much too well.”
“In any case, we’ve spoiled enough of one fine day with it.” Sabine lighted another cigarette and said with an abrupt change of tone, “About this furniture, Olivia. … I don’t want it. I’ve a house full of such things in Paris. I shouldn’t know what to do with it and I don’t think I have the right to break it up and sell it. I want you to have it here at Pentlands. … Horace Pentland would be satisfied if it went to you and Cousin John. And it’ll be an excuse to clear out some of the Victorian junk and some of the terrible early American stuff. Plenty of people will buy the early American things. The best of them are only bad imitations of the real things Horace Pentland collected, and you might as well have the real ones.”
Olivia protested, but Sabine pushed the point, scarcely giving her time to speak. “I want you to do it. It will be a kindness to me … and after all, Horace Pentland’s furniture ought to be here … in Pentlands. I’ll take one or two things for Thérèse, and the rest you must keep, only nothing … not so much as a medallion or a snuffbox … is to go to Aunt Cassie. She hated him while he was alive. It would be wrong for her to possess anything belonging to him after he is dead. Besides,” she added, “a little new furniture would do a great deal toward cheering up the house. It’s always been rather spare and cold. It needs a little elegance and sense of luxury. There has never been any splendor in the Pentland family—or in all New England, for that matter.”
II
At almost the same moment that Olivia and Sabine entered the old house to lunch, the figures of Sybil and Jean appeared against the horizon on the rim of the great, bald hill crowned by the town burial-ground. Escaped at length from the eye of the curious, persistent Thérèse, they had come to the hill to eat their lunch in the open air. It was a brilliantly clear day and the famous view lay spread out beneath them like some vast map stretching away for a distance of nearly thirty miles. The marshes appeared green and dark, crossed and recrossed by a reticulation of tidal inlets frequented at nightfall by small boats which brought in whisky and rum from the open sea. There were, distantly visible, great piles of reddish rock rising from the endless white ribbon of beach, and far out on the amethyst sea a pair of white-sailed fishing-boats moved away in the direction of Gloucester. The white sails, so near to each other, carried a warm friendliness in a universe magnificent but also bleak and a little barren.
Coming over the rim of the hill the sudden revelation of the view halted them for a moment. The day was hot, but here on the great hill, remote from the damp, low-lying meadows, there was a fresh cool wind, almost a gale, blowing in from the open sea. Sybil, taking off her hat, tossed it to the ground and allowed the wind to blow her hair in a dark, tangled mass about the serious young face; and at the same moment Jean, seized by a sudden quick impulse, took her hand quietly in his. She did not attempt to draw it away; she simply stood there quietly, as if conscious only of the wild beauty of the landscape spread out below them and the sense of the boy’s nearness to her. The old fear of depression and loneliness seemed to have melted away from her; here on this high brown hill, with all the world spread out beneath, it seemed to her that they were completely alone … the first and the last two people in all the world. She was aware that a perfect thing had happened to her, so perfect and so far beyond the realm of her most romantic imaginings that it seemed scarcely real.
A flock of glistening white gulls, sweeping in from the sea, soared toward them screaming wildly, and she said, “We’d better find a place to eat.”
She had taken from the hands of Sabine the task of showing Jean this little corner of his own country, and today they had come to see the view from the burial-ground and read the moldering queer old inscriptions on the tombstones. On entering the graveyard they came almost at once to the little corner allotted long ago to immigrants with the name of Pentland—a corner nearly filled now with neat rows of graves. By the side of the latest two, still new and covered with fresh sod, they halted, and she began in silence to separate the flowers she had brought from her mother’s garden into two great bunches.
“This,” she said, pointing to the grave at her feet, “is his. The other grave is Cousin Horace Pentland’s, whom I never saw. He died in Mentone. … He was a first cousin of my grandfather.”
Jean helped her to fill the two vases
