“I know,” said Olivia softly. “I remember seeing her when I first came to Pentlands … and Sabine has told me.”
The name of Sabine appeared to rouse him suddenly. He sat up very straight and said, “Don’t trust Sabine too far, Olivia. She belongs to us, after all. She’s very like my sister Cassie … more like her than you can imagine. It’s why they hate each other so. She’s Cassie turned inside out, as you might say. They’d both sacrifice everything for the sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them. They live … vicariously.”
Olivia would have interrupted him, defending Sabine and telling of the one real thing that had happened to her … the tragic love for her husband; she would have told him of all the abrupt, incoherent confidences Sabine had made her; but the old man gave her no chance. It seemed suddenly that he had become possessed, fiercely intent upon pouring out to her all the dark things he had kept hidden for so long.
(She kept thinking, “Why must I know all these things? Why must I take up the burden? Why was it that I should find those letters which had lain safe and hidden for so long?”)
He was talking again quietly, the bony fingers weaving in and out their nervous futile pattern. “You see, Olivia. … You see, she takes drugs now … and there’s no use in trying to cure her. She’s old now, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if she were young with all her life before her.”
Almost without thinking, Olivia answered, “I know that.”
He looked up quickly. “Know it?” he asked sharply. “How could you know it?”
“Sabine told me.”
The head bowed again. “Oh, Sabine! Of course! She’s dangerous. She knows far too much of the world. She’s known too many strange people.” And then he repeated again what he had said months ago after the ball. “She ought never to have come back here.”
Into the midst of the strange, disjointed conversation there came presently the sound of music drifting toward them from the distant drawing-room. John Pentland, who was a little deaf, did not hear it at first, but after a little time he sat up, listening, and turning toward her, asked, “Is that Sybil’s young man?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?”
“A very nice boy.”
After a silence he asked, “What’s the name of the thing he’s playing?”
Olivia could not help smiling. “It’s called ‘I’m in Love Again and the Spring Is A-Comin’.’ Jean brought it back from Paris. A friend of his wrote it … but names don’t mean anything in music any more. No one listens to the words.”
A shadow of amusement crossed his face. “Songs have queer names nowadays.”
She would have escaped, then, going quietly away. She stirred and even made a gesture toward leaving, but he raised his hand in the way he had, making her feel that she must obey him as if she were a child.
“There are one or two more things you ought to know, Olivia … things that will help you to understand. Someone has to know them. Someone. …” He halted abruptly and again made a great effort to go on. The veins stood out sharply on the bony head.
“It’s about her chiefly,” he said, with the inevitable gesture toward the north wing. “She wasn’t always that way. That’s what I want to explain. You see … we were married when we were both very young. It was my father who wanted it. I was twenty and she was eighteen. My father had known her family always. They were cousins of ours, in a way, just as they were cousins of Sabine’s. He had gone to school with her father and they belonged to the same club and she was an only child with a prospect of coming into a great fortune. It’s an old story, you see, but a rather common one in our world. … All these things counted, and as for myself, I’d never had anything to do with women and I’d never been in love with anyone. I was very young. I think they saw it as a perfect match … made in the hard, prosperous Heaven of their dreams. She was very pretty … you can see even now that she must have been very pretty. … She was sweet, too, and innocent.” He coughed, and continued with a great effort. “She had … she had a mind like a little child’s. She knew nothing … a flower of innocence,” he added with a strange savagery.
And then, as if the effort were too much for him, he paused and sat staring out of the window toward the sea. To Olivia it seemed that he had slipped back across the years to the time when the poor old lady had been young and perhaps curiously shy of his ardent wooing. A silence settled again over the room, so profound that this time the faint, distant roaring of the surf on the rocks became audible, and then again the sound of Jean’s music breaking in upon them. He was playing another tune … not “I’m in Love Again,” but one called “Ukulele Lady.”
“I wish they’d stop that damned music!” said John Pentland.
“I’ll go,” began Olivia, rising.
“No … don’t go. You mustn’t go … not now.” He seemed anxious, almost terrified, perhaps by the fear that if he did not tell now he would never tell her the long story that he must tell to someone. “No, don’t go … not until I’ve finished, Olivia. I must finish. … I want you to know why such things happened as happened here yesterday and the day before in this room. … There’s no
