He was talking again. “It’s not only money that’s been left to you. … There’s Sybil, who’s still too young to be let free. …”
“No,” said Olivia with a quiet stubbornness, “she’s not too young. She’s to do as she pleases. I’ve tried to make her wiser than I was at her age … perhaps wiser than I’ve ever been … even now.”
“Perhaps you’re right, my dear. You have been so many times … and things aren’t the same as they were in my day … certainly not with young girls.”
He took up the papers again, fussing over them in a curious, nervous way, very unlike his usual firm, unrelenting manner. She had a flash of insight which told her that he was behaving thus because he wanted to avoid looking at her. She hated confidences and she was afraid now that he was about to tell her things she preferred never to hear. She hated confidences and yet she seemed to be a person who attracted them always.
“And leaving Sybil out of it,” he continued, “there’s queer old Miss Haddon in Durham whom, as you know, we’ve taken care of for years; and there’s Cassie, who’s growing old and ill, I think. We can’t leave her to half-witted Miss Peavey. I know my sister Cassie has been a burden to you. … She’s been a burden to me, all my life. …” He smiled grimly. “I suppose you know that. …” Then, after a pause, he said, “But most of all, there’s my wife.”
His voice assumed a queer, unnatural quality, from which all feeling had been removed. It became like the voices of deaf persons who never hear the sounds they make.
“I can’t leave her alone,” he said. “Alone … with no one to care for her save a paid nurse. I couldn’t die and know that there’s no one to think of her … save that wretched, efficient Miss Egan … a stranger. No, Olivia … there’s no one but you. … No one I can trust.” He looked at her sharply. “You’ll promise me to keep her here always … never to let them send her away? You’ll promise?”
Again she was caught. “Of course,” she said. “Of course I’ll promise you that.” What else was she to say?
“Because,” he added, looking away from her once more, “because I owe her that … even after I’m dead. I couldn’t rest if she were shut up somewhere … among strangers. You see … once … once. …” He broke off sharply, as if what he had been about to say was unbearable.
With Olivia the sense of uneasiness changed into actual terror. She wanted to cry out, “Stop! … Don’t go on!” But some instinct told her that he meant to go on and on to the very end, painfully, despite anything she could do.
“It’s odd,” he was saying quite calmly, “but there seem to be only women left … no men … for Anson is really an old woman.”
Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind of machine, he went on, “And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we needn’t think of him any longer. … But there’s Mrs. Soames. …” He coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great agony. “There’s Mrs. Soames,” he repeated. “I know that you understand about her, Olivia … and I’m grateful to you for having been kind and human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we’ve given Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty years … but I don’t care about that. They’ve watched us … they’ve known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house … the very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world, Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my dear. They watch you … they see everything you do. They almost know what you think … and when they don’t know, they make it up. That’s one of the signs of a sick, decaying world … that they get their living vicariously … by watching someone else live … that they live always in the past. That’s the only reason I ever felt sorry for Horace Pentland … the only reason that I had sympathy for him. It was cruel that he should have been born in such a place.”
The bitterness ran like acid through all the speech, through the very timbre of his voice. It burned in the fierce black eyes where the fire was not yet dead. Olivia believed that she was seeing him now for the first time, in his fullness, with nothing concealed. And as she listened, the old cloud of mystery that had always hidden him from her began to clear away like the fog lifting from the marshes in the early morning. She saw him now as he really was … a man fiercely masculine, bitter, clearheaded, and more human than the rest of them, who had never before betrayed himself even for an instant.
“But about Mrs. Soames. … If anything should happen to me, Olivia … if I should die first, I want you to be kind to her … for my sake and for hers. She’s been patient and good to me for so long.” The bitterness seemed to flow away a little now, leaving only a kindling warmth in its place. “She’s been good to me. … She’s always understood, Olivia, even before you came here to help me. You and
