He sat forward on the edge of his chair, all eagerness. “Why …” he began, stammering a little, “I couldn’t think of living without her. It’s different from anything I ever imagined. Why … we’ve planned everything … all our lives. If ever I lost her, it wouldn’t matter what happened to me afterwards.” He grinned and added, “But you see … people have said all that before. There aren’t any words to explain … to make it seem as different from anything else as it seems to me.”
“But you’re going to take her away?”
“Yes … she wants to go where I go.”
(“They are young,” thought Olivia. “They’ve never once thought of anyone else … myself or Sybil’s grandfather.”)
Aloud she said, “That’s right, Jean. … I want you to take her away … no matter what happens, you must take her away. …” (“And then I won’t even have Sybil.”)
“We’re going to my ranch in the Argentine.”
“That’s right. … I think Sybil would like that.” She sighed, in spite of herself, vaguely envious of these two. “But you’re so young. How can you know for certain.”
A shadow crossed his face and he said, “I’m twenty-five, Mrs. Pentland … but that’s not the only thing. … I was brought up, you see, among the French … like a Frenchman. That makes a difference.” He hesitated, frowning for a moment. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell. … You mightn’t understand. I know how things are in this part of the world. … You see, I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural … something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I’ve been in love before, casually … the way young Frenchmen are … but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can’t help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can’t help it. If it were just … just something shameful and nasty, he couldn’t endure it. They don’t have affairs in cold blood … the way I’ve heard men talk about such things since I’ve come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at the thing in the light they do. It’s different here. … I see the difference more every day.”
He was talking earnestly, passionately, and when he paused for a moment she remained silent, unwilling to interrupt him until he had finished.
“What I’m trying to say is difficult, Mrs. Pentland. It’s simply this … that I’m twenty-five, but I’ve had experience with life. Don’t laugh! Don’t think I’m just a college boy trying to make you think I’m a roué. Only what I say is true. I know about such things … and I’m glad because it makes me all the more certain that Sybil is the only woman in the world for me … the one for whom I’d sacrifice everything. And I’ll know better how to make her happy, to be gentle with her … to understand her. I’ve learned now, and it’s a thing which needs learning … the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love.” He turned away with a sudden air of sadness. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you all this. … I’ve told Sybil. She understands.”
“No,” said Olivia, “I think you’re right … perhaps.” She kept thinking of the long tragic story of John Pentland, and of Anson, who had always been ashamed of love and treated it as something distasteful. To them it had been a dark, strange thing always touched by shame. She kept thinking, despite anything she could do, of Anson’s clumsy, artificial attempts at lovemaking, and she was swept suddenly by shame for him. Anson, so proud and supercilious, was a poor thing, inferior even to his own groom.
“But why,” she asked, “didn’t you tell me about Sybil sooner? Everyone has seen it, but you never spoke to me.”
For a moment he did not answer her. An expression of pain clouded the blue eyes, and then, looking at her directly, he said, “It’s not easy to explain why. I was afraid to come to you for fear you mightn’t understand, and the longer I’ve been here, the longer I’ve put it off because … well, because here in Durham, ancestors, family, all that, seems to be the beginning and end of everything. It seems always to be a question of who one’s family is. There is only the past and no future at all. And, you see, in a way … I haven’t any family.” He shrugged his big shoulders and repeated, “In a way, I haven’t any family at all. You see, my mother was never married to my father. … I’ve no blood-right to the name of de Cyon. I’m … I’m … well, just a bastard, and it seemed hopeless for me even to talk to a Pentland about Sybil.”
He saw that she was startled, disturbed, but he could not have known that the look in her eyes had very little to do with shock at what he had told her; rather she was thinking what a weapon the knowledge would be in the hands of Anson and Aunt Cassie and even John Pentland himself.
He was talking again with the same passionate earnestness.
“I shan’t let it make any difference, so long as Sybil will have me, but, you see, it’s very hard to explain, because it isn’t the way it seems. I want you to understand that my mother is a wonderful woman. … I wouldn’t bother to explain, to say anything … except to Sybil and to you.”
“Sabine has told me about her.”
“Mrs. Callendar has known her for a long time. … They’re great friends,” said Jean. “She understands.”
“But she never told me … that. You mean that she’s known it all along?”
“It’s not an easy thing to tell … especially here in Durham, and I fancy she thought it might make trouble for me … after she saw what had happened to Sybil and me.”
He went on quickly, telling her what he had told Sybil of his mother’s story, trying to make her understand what he understood, and Sabine and even his
