She opened the door softly and found that the lights were still burning and, strangest of all, that her husband was sitting at the old desk surrounded by the musty books and yellowed letters and papers from which he was compiling laboriously a book known as The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The sight of him surprised her, for it was his habit to retire punctually at eleven every night, even on such an occasion as this. He had disappeared hours earlier from the ball, and he still sat here in his dinner coat, though it was long after midnight.
She had entered the room so softly that he did not hear her and for a moment she remained silently looking down at him, as if undetermined whether to speak or to go quietly away. He sat with his back to her so that the sloping shoulders and the thin, ridged neck and partly bald head stood outlined against the white of the paneling. Suddenly, as if conscious of being watched, he turned and looked at her. He was a man of forty-nine who looked older, with a long horseface like Aunt Cassie’s—a face that was handsome in a tired, yellow sort of way—and small, round eyes the color of pale-blue porcelain. At the sight of Olivia the face took on a pouting expression of sourness … a look which she knew well as one that he wore when he meant to complain of something.
“You are sitting up very late,” she observed quietly, with a deliberate air of having noticed nothing unusual.
“I was waiting to speak to you. I want to talk with you. Please sit down for a moment.”
There was an odd sense of strangeness in their manner toward each other, as if there had never been, even years before when the children were babies, any great intimacy between them. On his part there was, too, a sort of stiff and nervous formality, rather quaint and Victorian, and touched by an odd air of timidity. He was a man who would always do not perhaps the proper thing, but the thing accepted by his world as “proper.”
It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for so many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant usually that there was some complaint to be made against the servants, more often than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd, inexplicable intensity.
Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat there, waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on which he had been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange, unaccustomed desire to be disagreeable, to create in some way an excitement that would shatter for a moment the overwhelming sense of monotony and so relieve her nerves. She thought, “What has come over me? Am I one of those women who enjoys working up scenes?”
He rose from his chair and stood, very tall and thin, with drooping shoulders, looking down at her out of the pale eyes. “It’s about Sybil,” he said. “I understand that she goes riding every morning with this fellow O’Hara.”
“That’s true,” replied Olivia quietly. “They go every morning before breakfast, before the rest of us are out.”
He frowned and assumed almost mechanically a manner of severe dignity. “And you mean to say that you have known about it all along?”
“They meet down in the meadows by the old gravel-pit because he doesn’t care to come up to the house.”
“He knows, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be welcome.”
Olivia smiled a little ironically. “I’m sure that’s the reason. That’s why he didn’t come tonight, though I asked him. You must know, Anson, that I don’t feel as you do about him.”
“No, I suppose not. You rarely do.”
“There’s no need to be unpleasant,” she said quietly.
“You seem to know a great deal about it.”
“Sybil tells me everything she does. It is much better to have it that way, I think.”
Watching him, it gave her a faint, warm sense of satisfaction to see that Anson was annoyed by her calmness, and yet she was a little ashamed, too, for wanting the excitement of a small scene, just a tiny scene, to make life seem a little more exciting. He said, “But you know how Aunt Cassie and my father feel about O’Hara.”
Then, for the first time, Olivia began to see light in the darkness. “Your father knows all about it, Anson. He has gone with them himself on the red mare, once or twice.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Why should I make up such a ridiculous lie? Besides, your father and I get on very well. You know that.” It was a mild thrust which had its success, for Anson turned away angrily. She had really said to him, “Your father comes to me about everything, not to you. He is not the one who objects or I should have known.” Aloud she said, “Besides, I have seen him with my own eyes.”
“Then I will take it on my own responsibility. I don’t like it and I want it stopped.”
At
