And the sight of the old man walking gently and slowly, out of deference to Mrs. Soames’ infirmities, filled Olivia with a sudden desire to weep.
John Pentland said, “I’m going to drive over with Mrs. Soames, Olivia dear. You can leave the door open for me.” And giving his daughter-in-law a quick look of affection he led Mrs. Soames away across the terrace to his motor.
It was only after they had gone that Olivia discovered Sabine standing in the corridor in her brilliant green dress watching the two old people from the shadow of one of the deep-set windows. For a moment, absorbed in the sight of John Pentland helping Mrs. Soames with a grim courtliness into the motor, neither of them spoke, but as the motor drove away down the long drive under the moon-silvered elms, Sabine sighed and said, “I can remember her as a great beauty … a really great beauty. There aren’t any more like her, who make their beauty a profession. I used to see her when I was a little girl. She was beautiful—like Diana in the hunting-field. They’ve been like that for … for how long. … It must be forty years, I suppose.”
“I don’t know,” said Olivia quietly. “They’ve been like that ever since I came to Pentlands.” (And as she spoke she was overcome by a terrible feeling of sadness, of an abysmal futility. It had come to her more and more often of late, so often that at times it alarmed her lest she was growing morbid.)
Sabine was speaking again in her familiar, precise, metallic voice. “I wonder,” she said, “if there has ever been anything. …”
Olivia, divining the rest of the question, answered it quickly, interrupting the speech. “No … I’m sure there’s never been anything more than we’ve seen. … I know him well enough to know that.”
For a long time Sabine remained thoughtful, and at last she said: “No … I suppose you’re right. There couldn’t have been anything. He’s the last of the Puritans. … The others don’t count. They go on pretending, but they don’t believe any more. They’ve no vitality left. They’re only hypocrites and shadows. … He’s the last of the royal line.”
She picked up her silver cloak and, flinging it about her fine white shoulders, said abruptly: “It’s almost morning. I must get some sleep. The time’s coming when I have to think about such things. We’re not as young as we once were, Olivia.”
On the moonlit terrace she turned and asked: “Where was O’Hara? I didn’t see him.”
“No … he was asked. I think he didn’t come on account of Anson and Aunt Cassie.”
The only reply made by Sabine was a kind of scornful grunt. She turned away and entered her motor. The ball was over now and the last guest gone, and she had missed nothing—Aunt Cassie, nor old John Pentland, nor O’Hara’s absence, nor even Higgins watching them all in the moonlight from the shadow of the lilacs.
The night had turned cold as the morning approached and Olivia, standing in the doorway, shivered a little as she watched Sabine enter her motor and drive away. Far across the meadows she saw the lights of John Pentland’s motor racing along the lane on the way to the house of old Mrs. Soames; she watched them as they swept out of sight behind the birch thicket and reappeared once more beyond the turnpike, and as she turned away at last it occurred to her that the life at Pentlands had undergone some subtle change since the return of Sabine.
II
It was Olivia’s habit (and in some way every small action at Pentlands came inevitably to be a habit) to go about the house each night before climbing the paneled stairs, to see that all was in order, and by instinct she made the little tour as usual after Sabine had disappeared, stopping here and there to speak to the servants, bidding them to go to bed and clear away in the morning. On her way she found that the door of the drawing-room, which had been open all the evening, was now, for some reason, closed.
It was a big square room belonging to the old part of the house that had been built by the Pentland who made a fortune out of equipping privateers and practising a sort of piracy upon British merchantmen—a room which in the passing of years had come to be a museum filled with the relics and souvenirs of a family which could trace its ancestry back three hundred years to a small dissenting shopkeeper who had stepped ashore on the bleak New England coast very soon after Miles Standish and Priscilla Alden. It was a room much used by all the family and had a worn, pleasant look that compensated for the monstrous and incongruous collection of pictures and furniture. There were two or three Sheraton and Heppelwhite chairs and a handsome old mahogany table, and there were a plush sofa and a vast rocking-chair of uncertain ancestry, and a hideous bronze lamp that had been the gift of Mr. Longfellow to old John Pentland’s mother. There were two execrable watercolors—one of the Tiber and the Castle San Angelo and one of an Italian village—made by Miss Maria Pentland during a tour of Italy in 1846, and a stuffed chair with tassels, a gift from old Colonel Higginson, a frigid steel engraving of the Signing of the Declaration which hung over the white mantelpiece, and a complete set of Woodrow Wilson’s History of the United States given by Senator Lodge (whom Aunt Cassie always referred to as “dear Mr. Lodge”). In this room were collected mementoes of long visits paid by Mr. Lowell and Mr. Emerson and General Curtis and
