“Of course, more than ever tonight. … I’m sorry you’ve decided to go so soon. … It’ll be dreary without you or Sybil.”
“You can go, too,” said Sabine quickly. “There is a way. He’d give up everything for you … everything. I know that.” Suddenly she gave Olivia a sharp look. “You’re thirty-eight, aren’t you?”
“Day after tomorrow I shall be forty!”
Sabine was tracing the design of roses on Horace Pentland’s Savonnerie carpet with the tip of her parasol. “Gather them while you may,” she said and went out into the blazing heat to cross the meadows to Brook Cottage.
Left alone, Olivia knew she was glad that day after tomorrow Sabine would no longer be here. She saw now what John Pentland meant when he said, “Sabine ought never to have come back here.”
V
The heat clung on far into the evening, penetrating with the darkness even the drawing-room where they sat—Sabine and John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames and Olivia—playing bridge for the last time, and as the evening wore on the game went more and more badly, with the old lady forgetting her cards and John Pentland being patient and Sabine sitting in a controlled and sardonic silence, with an expression on her face which said clearly, “I can endure this for tonight because tomorrow I shall escape again into the lively world.”
Jean and Sybil sat for a time at the piano, and then fell to watching the bridge. No one spoke save to bid or to remind Mrs. Soames that it was time for her shaking hands to distribute the cards about the table. Even Olivia’s low, quiet voice sounded loud in the hot stillness of the old room.
At nine o’clock Higgins appeared with a message for Olivia—that Mr. O’Hara was being detained in town and that if he could get away before ten he would come down and stop at Pentlands if the lights were still burning in the drawing-room. Otherwise he would not be down to ride in the morning.
Once during a pause in the game Sabine stirred herself to say, “I haven’t asked about Anson’s book. He must be near to the end.”
“Very near,” said Olivia. “There’s very little more to be done. Men are coming tomorrow to photograph the portraits. He’s using them to illustrate the book.”
At eleven, when they came to the end of a rubber, Sabine said, “I’m sorry, but I must stop. I must get up early tomorrow to see about the packing.” And turning to Jean she said, “Will you drive me home? Perhaps Sybil will ride over with us for the air. You can bring her back.”
At the sound of her voice, Olivia wanted to cry out, “No, don’t go. You mustn’t leave me now … alone. You mustn’t go away like this!” But she managed to say quietly, in a voice which sounded far away, “Don’t stay too late, Sybil,” and mechanically, without knowing what she was doing, she began to put the cards back again in their boxes.
She saw that Sabine went out first, and then John Pentland and old Mrs. Soames, and that Jean and Sybil remained behind until the others had gone, until John Pentland had helped the old lady gently into his motor and driven off with her. Then, looking up with a smile which somehow seemed to give her pain she said, “Well?”
And Sybil, coming to her side, kissed her and said in a low voice, “Goodbye, darling, for a little while. … I love you. …” And Jean kissed her in a shy fashion on both cheeks.
She could find nothing to say. She knew Sybil would come back, but she would be a different Sybil, a Sybil who was a woman, no longer the child who even at eighteen sometimes had the absurd trick of sitting on her mother’s knee. And she was taking away with her something that until now had belonged to Olivia, something which she could never again claim. She could find nothing to say. She could only follow them to the door, from where she saw Sabine already sitting in the motor as if nothing in the least unusual were happening; and all the while she wanted to go with them, to run away anywhere at all.
Through a mist she saw them turning to wave to her as the motor drove off, to wave gaily and happily because they were at the beginning of life. … She stood in the doorway to watch the motor-lights slipping away in silence down the lane and over the bridge through the blackness to the door of Brook Cottage. There was something about Brook Cottage … something that was lacking from the air of Pentlands: it was where Toby Cane and Savina Pentland had had their wanton meetings.
In the still heat the sound of the distant surf came to her dimly across the marshes, and into her mind came absurdly words she had forgotten for years … “The breaking waves dashed high on the stern and rockbound coast.” Against the accompaniment of the surf, the crickets and katydids (harbingers of autumn) kept up a fiddling and singing; and far away in the direction of Marblehead she watched the eye of a lighthouse winking and winking. She was aware of every sight and sound and odor of the breathless night. It might storm, she thought, before they got into Connecticut. They would be motoring all the night. …
The lights of Sabine’s motor were moving again now, away from Brook Cottage, through O’Hara’s land, on and on in the direction of the turnpike. In the deep hollow by the river they disappeared for a moment and then were to be seen once more against the black mass of the hill crowned by the town burial-ground. And then abruptly they were gone, leaving only the sound of the surf and the music of the crickets and the distant, ironically winking lighthouse.
She kept seeing them side by side in the motor racing
